I hope it’s a proven fact, bitch-ass plagarist fuck.
I feel weirdly accomplished in that I had no idea who anyone involved in all these plagiarism scandals was. I don’t think I recognized a single youtube account that’s been mentioned at any point.
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To be fair, MatPat doesn’t have any plagarism scandal around him, he’s just pretty well known to swipe most of the theories for his content from others, and has been since the start of the channel. There’s also been some other stuff - like, for example, swiping IP to make a merch line, ask me about that sometime that isn’t searchable text on the internet - but basically his entire career is built on other people’s work.
If you’re a big time YouTuber/streamer, and I have never heard of you, it’s in your best interest to make sure I never hear of you. Because 99% of the time when I discover these people for the first time, it’s because they’re pieces of shit.
And I feel weirdly disappointed that you are trying to pretend not to know who the Angry Video Game Nerd is.
He’s involved in all this whole plagiarism thing?
He’s in the thumbnail in the video above…
Yes, you could say he is a victim, but it is also kind of self-inflicted. For his Cinemassacre channel he has teamed up with basically a content mill who are more or less now writing his videos for him. For a Halloween special it turned out that one of the writers blatantly copied reviews of horror movies from elsewhere, which forced them to redo the whole thing in about a week.
Here’s a link to hbomberguys video with a timestamp for the section on that fiasco (27:57 if the timestap doesn’t work).
I didn’t want to assume anything from a thumbnail. (I also didn’t notice him before). He could have been the one plagiarized from. I just didn’t have time for a four hour video from a youtuber I’d never heard of calling out other youtubers I’d never heard of.
I also honestly didn’t know that guy was even still this active. I lost sight of him years ago.
Callouts with receipts like this are better served by a web page with a list of what was stolen by whom and from whom than 3:50 of video.
So you didn’t watch the video, but nevertheless you felt confident in smugly proclaiming
I feel weirdly accomplished in that I had no idea who anyone involved in all these plagiarism scandals was. I don’t think I recognized a single youtube account that’s been mentioned at any point.
I also think you are missing something important in that critiquing lazy video making such as plagiarism via the form of video allows for a continuity of medium. Some of the plagiarized videos mentioned are more than an hour long and people who watch those aren’t really spooked by the 4-hour runtime and/or know what a pause button does. It also teaches people who to spot incongruities that might indicate plagiarism.
The video also functions as a video essay itself, critiquing the format and its unfortunate ability to draw in plagiarists for a quick buck after becoming popular, but also hbomb criticizes himself and his style in bits and pieces throughout. It also criticizes the dichotomy of art and commerce, where making money is often placed above making something interesting or original.
And the final part you are missing is that all the money raised through ads on that video (which has 14 million views and counting btw) is donated to affected parties who had their stuff ripped off.
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Oh don’t get me wrong. Godspeed to everyone involved who wasn’t plagiarizing
I just avoid that whole sphere of youtube altogether. And I honestly have no idea who really any of the people are. I don’t have time for a four hour video about anything that isn’t a university lecture, an S-Tier speedrun, or a feature film. Even Summoning Salts are a couple hours tops and I usually watch them in a few sessions.
So from my outsider perspective, I suddenly see multiple videos being talked about that are just meta about the plagiarism with no context about who any of the people are, what kind of content they make, etc… The meta conversation appeared for me ahead of any of the actual content itself. The controversy appears in my feed ahead of the people or videos that the controversy is even about.
It’s a lot like when I’d see something trending on Twitter back in the day, and everyone was mad about something, but I had no idea what. And every time, I had to dig into places on the Internet I never otherwise go if I wanted to even have the context of what everyone was suddenly talking about. 
I’m going about my life and someone’s like "hbomberguy made a video about the thing and I don’t know who hbomberguy is nor do I know what the thing is. And in my private social circles, it’s 80% people who have never heard of that account, and ~20% who follow it religiously.
I’ve never regretted just ignoring youtube drama unless it touches me on its own.
A good example is the Billy Mitchell ongoing drama. It’s all over my feeds and I see a lot of chatter about it. There’s a lot of “takedown” content on him.
But if I didn’t already know about him, it would just be weird decontextualized “youtube drama” that I’d ignore.
(I’m still ignoring it, since there’s nothing new worth saying about that dude, but I at least happened to know who he was).
This leads to Rym’s Rule: If you encounter the controversy before you encounter the thing, just close the tab.
I feel like when I discovered Summoning Salts it was really interesting. But since, the runtimes have greatly increased and speed tech explanation has gone way down. Now they feel like just a narration of the record time progression.
then runner JoeyJoeJo set his sights on a new goal: sub 26 minutes.
[…] he kept practicing, and on January 15 he got 26:05
9 days later, he started a promising run but then lost it to RNG
[5 minutes pass]
4 days after that, he got a 26:02
but then, runner Scort Roblinsky jumped ahead with a 26:01
on February 30th, he finally did it: 25:59.1.
[synth music]
Could really use an editor, to my taste at least.
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Wow yeah I just looked at the last few (as opposed to the back catalogue)…
I guess over time I put them on more as background and only super pay attention to the tech increases.
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Let’s say you look at one of these YouTube dramas. And it’s such a cut-and-dry case that we can all agree on who is in the right, and who is in the wrong. Obviously the people in the wrong can GTFO, but I also end up leaving with a poor taste in my mouth regarding the people who are in the right.
Why is that? Because that kind of content, even when it’s 100% truthful, is tabloid content. As soon as you publish it, you’ve given up on whatever you were before, and turned yourself into People magazine. It’s gross to try and profiteer and milk like/subscribes by telling a sordid tale, even if you are not the wrongdoer in the tale.
You might say hey. There’s a difference between investigative journalism takedowns and tabloid gossip. That’s completely correct. But investigative journalism of your own community is inappropriate and off-topic. That should come from an outside channel dedicated to that sort of thing.
Can you imagine if the next episode of your favorite TV show wasn’t a new episode at all. It was just the writers openly airing their grievances with their bosses. Now, that would be kind of legendary, but also wildly inappropriate. That content belongs somewhere that people discuss the TV industry, not in the show itself. I guess they could produce an actual episode that attacks via satire. That would be epic, but it’s neither here nor there.
Imagine a magazine about food. It can have all sorts of content. Recipes, interviews with food scientists, investigations of the food supply chain, reviews of equipment. There’s such a wide variety of stories they can tell. They can even write about spicy drama between celebrity chefs, but they can never tell the story of drama between editors of food magazines.
It’s off-topic. It’s not about food. It’s about journalism. The audience is not the community. They care about food. They don’t care about food magazines. That’s meta. Few of them know or care about the people who make the magazine. Most readers probably couldn’t name a single writer. You’re no longer telling a food story, you’re telling your own story. Casting the lens away from your topic and towards yourself, and/or your community. It’s tacky as heck.
That’s not completely correct, though. In this day and age, so much is about the parasocial relationships. So many audiences are there not for the story, but for the storyteller. Those people should make content about their drama. That is their thing. That’s what works for them in the year 2024.
But that’s not my thing. I’m a person who is there for the story. When I see someone with a channel like that, it’s a signal that they are that kind of media. A signal I should stay far far away, even if they are one of the good people who is in the right.
There is actually a Star Trek: DS9 episode that is kind of that. It’s legendary.
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Which episode? 15chars
Unsurprising. I assumed that either a very long-running show like Simpsons/Star Trek had done it already, or that a very short-running show did it as a final fuck you episode.
Doubly unsurprising, because Rick Berman was a soulless piece of shit ladled into a corporate suit, and basically everybody on staff hated the fucker.
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He uploaded his final video today.
The end.
Star Trek: Voyager, “Muse” S6.E22 covers this idea pretty well. I do not remember the ST:DS9 episode.