Congratulations On All Your Success, and Good-Bye

On the rare occasion that someone I interact with online asks me how long I’ve had a channel of my own on YouTube, my response tends to make them blink rapidly and say nothing immediately in return. When they do respond finally, it’s usually in the form of the question, “How have you kept the same channel/account so long, and I’ve never heard of your channel?” Simple, really; I never really had much in the way of success with it as a creator of online content, because what I do is incredibly niche. Add to that an overwhelming lack of skill in selling myself as a personality, and Bob’s your uncle, ha! In all seriousness, that’s actually about 70% of the answer, with the rest filled in with a combination of mostly being a viewer of content rather than a creator of it, and living a fairly Everyman lower-middle-class American life. This includes having been married, having children, going through a rancorous divorce, moving halfway across the country to start over again, getting remarried, and having more children. I am Dad first and foremost, as I have said many’s the time, and that involves actually enjoying the interactions with my wife and kids, working a regular job, and tending to my duties as a citizen.

All of that being said, I do somehow manage to spend quite a bit of time in the online realm, perhaps more than is necessarily healthy for a man of my age (43) and responsibilities. I tend to lean into spaces on YouTube, Rumble, Facebook and X, as well as Discord, closely associated with my hobbies and interests- chiefly books and bookish things, video games, philosophy, psychology, American football and MMA. I watch quite a bit of content in the socio-political arena as well, but I don’t actively participate in many conversations in that realm, because I’m not read-in enough in any one specific area to want to dip my toes into that particularly poisonous swamp. The areas where I do chime in there tend to have heavy overlap with cultural topics that I am closely connected to as both a father and a person involved in the arts.

A great deal of my time in the course of the last year spent as an audience member of livestreams on Rumble and YouTube has been in channels and chats associated with video games, and the journalism ostensibly surrounding that industry. There’s also a few movie and television streamers whose content I partake of, as well as a couple of folks who include all things pop culture (including comic books), but on Rumble (my preferred location as an audience member), it has largely been video games. In one particular user’s shows, a fellow named Hypnotic, I started saying hello to the chat in the opening minutes of his show by way of doing a sort of playful bit, which I will explain here:

Hypnotic’s fanbase has playfully dubbed themselves ‘The Bigot Army’, with Hypnotic serving in the role as their ‘Marginalized CEO and Leader’. I started introducing myself by saying, “Staff Sergeant Byronofsidius (my username) of the Bigot Army, Western Forces, reporting for duty!” A few other regulars in the chat took a shine to this, and one member started asking me for a ‘status report’, which I would respond to with little summary reports of battles and skirmishes of the Culture Wars, playing up that these were actual military-style engagements being led against the folks often collectively referred to as ‘The Woke’.

The whole thing was about as close to military sci-fi as I’ve ever come as a storyteller.

This went on for about six months before I gave myself a fictional promotion, changing my opening line to, “Master Sergeant Byronofsidius of the Bigot Army, NCOIC of Western Forces, reporting for duty!” It was all tongue-in-cheek, a good bit of fun before the show proper got started. Watching his streams led me to watching the shows of several other folks associated with his Saturday panel shows, including SmashJT, Toastywiththemosty69, FuriousDan45, and Ryan Roger Athay, among several others. Of course, I say ‘watching’ when, really, for the most part I just listen in, since the majority of their streaming programs are done during my working hours, so I just listen while I’m at work, occasionally taking the chance to chime in via text in the chat when I’m on a break.

This is how most people engage with online streaming shows, and there’s really nothing all that strange about it these days. However, as time has gone on, I’ve found myself increasingly disenchanted, tuning in to fewer and fewer streams, and becoming less inclined to bother even engaging in the chat. There are several reasons for this, most of which aren’t even really the fault of these users, per se. I’ll go over them now one at a time.

It Isn’t About the Show, It’s About the Rivalries

One of the earliest signals to me that being interactive with these streamers and personalities might not be suited for a person like myself was the introduction of one of the Internet’s most vile individuals into the personal and business lives of several of these folks I was watching: Alyssa Mercante. Formerly an editor at the digital video games and pop culture news website Kotaku, prior to its having become a defunct site sold off for spare parts, as well as having been a self-admitted former ‘cam girl’ and ‘digital stripper’ (her words via X/Twitter, not mine), Alyssa Mercante had gained a reputation in the online sphere that I had been floating tangentially around the borders of as something of a flamethrower and agitator. Consistently politically fringe-left/progressive in her ideological rhetoric online, to say that Mercante was aggressive in her views would be akin to saying that getting shot in the stomach might be uncomfortable.

If one wonders why I would label Ms. Mercante as ‘vile’, I would recommend briefly looking into her history of interactions with SmashJT, particularly her attempt to cause friction in his marriage when she privately messaged his wife and labeled him effectively a misogynist and terrible person all-around. Yes, that literally happened, and no amount of legal threats from her person or her camp of followers/orbiters can scrub that fact from existence.

Anyhow, the clash of socio-politically opposed personalities in the video games industry space and the commentary surrounding it has been ramping up since the first Gamergate series of incidents, and has only become more pronounced since. Recently, a second wave of this sort of thing flared up, causing more rampant back-and-forth nastiness to fly, and it has become a sideshow distraction from what drew me to this content and the channels I’d become attached to in the first place, which were the games themselves and the news surrounding the developers and studios. Frankly, it has drained a lot of my enthusiasm for the streams associated with the industry, because so many of them are now about the personality clashes, rather than the games that I have indulged in as a hobby since my own childhood, when all I needed to be happy was a joystick with a singular rounded orange button, thanks to the folks at Atari.

Pay to Play (or in this case, to speak)

It’s no secret that since the inception of the YouTube Partner Program, which allowed video content uploaders to monetize their efforts on the platform and start earning money from Google AdSense, people have fairly lost their collective minds trying to chase the dream of becoming online superstars. If you ask most folks under the age of 20 what they want to do professionally, a sizable chunk of them are going to tell you that they want to be YouTubers or professional streamers, be it in video games or socio-political debate and commentary. Never mind that most of these folks have all the potential of success of an ostrich trying to fly, one or two out of every ten-thousand of them are in fact going to strap on a rocket pack and defy sound logic (and the realities of such a bird in fact utilizing said device, but wouldn’t that make for one hell of a cartoon short?).

One of the components of turning streaming and live broadcasts into a sustainable career path for most of these folks is the direct donation during a show, known as Superchats on YouTube (and Super Stickers), Rants on Rumble, and channel memberships in both locations. On Kick and Twitch they’re dubbed ‘subs’ and ‘tips’, but they all come to the same thing, a direct financial offering of support from the members of the audience to the streamer in question. These chats get highlighted, and are usually read aloud during the program by the streamers themselves, as a way of showing their gratitude for the offered support. This seems like a great exchange, and is of benefit to all parties involved in the exchange, since the viewers engaging in them get to have their message or question highlighted and brought to the forefront, and the content producer gets monetary compensation for their efforts.

By and large, I support this system, since it is symbiotic in most cases. However, and I know I’ll get dog-walked for saying this by some folks in the very community I referenced earlier, but it deserves to be said that in regards to this whole practice, folks like Mercante have a valid point of criticism to raise. Before you grab the digital cat-o-nine-tails to flay me with, allow me to clarify. Mercante, along with folks like David Jaffe (another loon) and my own longtime online friend BelgianDan, have pointed out that this often ends up resulting in a kind of ‘Pay To Play’ scenario, wherein the only members of the audience who can get a point across to the mid-sized or larger content creators are the folks who have the disposable funds available to attach money to their words, leaving those of us who don’t, often derided as ‘Brokies’, to either flounder for another means of getting their message across, or having to swallow their words entirely, because unless you’re paying for the privilege of being acknowledged, you as a member of the audience are just a number in their view and ‘likes’ totals, and nothing more. This isn’t necessarily the actual truth of the matter, as there are plenty of streamers, I’m sure, who don’t feel this way about their audience, who are genuinely appreciative of the audiences they have. However, it does end up leaving a bad taste in some folks’ mouths, especially when said streamers indulge in dismissing such claims as being ‘cope and seethe’ or ‘the jealous ramblings of unimportant people’.

That last line is an exact quote from one of the very same folks who I have largely been enjoying as a member of the audience, by the way. It was insulting enough that I have not gone back to watch their material in over a month, and it doesn’t really matter, because I’m just one less number on the count total, easily replaced.

Waste of Time

There’s an expression that has gained a lot of steam over the last year or two in online discourse, one that I have to utter to myself repeatedly when I find myself getting too emotionally involved in the conversations taking place in this space: ‘Touch grass.’ It is a sibilant reminder to try not to take any of this stuff too personally, and to try and cease being so terminally online, to indulge in the real world in which we live as a form of reset, to properly realign one’s perceptions and remember to take what happens or is said online less personally and seriously.

I have come to recognize recently that there’s a good reason that I listen to as many of these shows as I do during my working hours. For the most part, my day job is relatively mindless, or at least requires so little intellectual effort on my part that I am under no risk of not being able to complete my assigned duties while also paying almost all of my active attention to the show being streamed. This is not to belittle the work I do, but let’s be honest, being a janitor at a casino is not exactly high-skill labor. More than anything, it requires a willingness to clean up after people, to take in verbal abuse from degenerate gamblers who are losing their money and need someone to hurl their invective and stupidity at, and to perform repetitive tasks that will just have to be done again in the next fifteen to thirty minutes, because people are hopelessly messy when they aren’t responsible for the caretaking of the place they are presently occupying and having fun in.

A couple of years ago, when I had an ear bud in at work, I was mostly listening to audiobooks, or podcasts focused on short sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories. There were a couple of geopolitics shows in the mix too, and even one or two cooking/food tourism shows I listened to throughout a shift, and these were really nice to indulge in passively. Over the last year, I’ve replaced a lot of those shows with these video game-related livestreams, and I’m starting to wonder if perhaps I’m wasting my time, because a lot of them cover the same topics from day to day, piggybacking off of one another’s coverage and commentary in a way that makes many of them start to feel very ‘same-y’, if you catch my meaning. It’s for that reason that I stopped routinely listening to Tim Pool’s ‘Timcast IRL’ show on a nightly basis, because there are plenty of other programs that cover the same material and topics, and do so without the insufferably smug Mr. Pool leading them, so why not use those alternatives instead?

Thankfully, I don’t spend any of my down time at home engaging with these shows at all, really, since most of them don’t livestream during the hours when I’m not working. The ones that do stream during such times are shows put out by personalities and channels so large that, well, they aren’t really geared toward interacting with their audiences anyway, such as ‘Louder With Crowder’ or Vince on Rumble, or LiteratureDevil on YouTube (who I enjoy, despite his obvious disdain for the horror genre of fiction, but that’s neither here nor there).

Chat-Reliant Programs

Okay, this one is, I will fully admit, not the fault of the streamers themselves, but is rather entirely a personal taste and circumstance issue. There are some folks whose channels I have unsubscribed from entirely because of the way in which they are structured, relying wholly on questions, comments or concerns brought up by their audiences for the topics they are going to discuss on the stream. There’s not a ton of them that I was listening to to begin with, but since most of these programs are playing while I’m working, I can’t interact with the chat or see the questions and conversations taking place, so I’m sort of left listening to a lot of dead air, or wondering what the hell the question was that the streamer is responding to, because about half of them forget to even say the question out loud and cite the source of said inquiry. That’s frustrating, but only because I’m not looking at the screen, which, again, is not the fault of the streamers who do this.

“Oh, You’re Too Insignificant For Me to Talk To…”

This is one sentiment that is pretty rampant in all social media spaces, really, and reflects a reality that, while rooted in a very real human phenomenon of behavior societally, is still intensely unpleasant to have one’s nose rubbed in with malicious intent. Frankly, what little credit I gave the Mercunte Creature earlier gets pretty handily wiped out by this aspect of her public persona, because she engages in the petty application and public insistence of it constantly.

In any version of media spaces, there is a hierarchy at play, one that is dependent on a couple of factors. The first factor that a lot of streamers reach for (really that anyone with a channel or account on any form of social media does) is follower/subscriber count. It’s a pissing contest, to be sure, but a lot of folks tend to use this as a means of dismissing even accurate and completely substantiated criticisms that get levied against them, because if the person raising the issues is of a lower count than the person being criticized, then they will be hand-waved away with a scoff and what amounts to a statement of “Away, ye peasant, you aren’t notable enough to deserve my attention or response.”

Credentialism is another form of this comparison game, and this is the one that Mercante wields like a spike-covered dildo to smack other content creators over the head with. Well, that and attempted lawsuits, just ask SmashJT… When Alyssa isn’t slapping together half-formed thoughts on her Bluesky account (a disturbingly pedo-friendly liberal/progressive alternative to Elon Musk’s X platform) or visiting X just long enough to un-block people, DM them with some nasty missive, then proceed to block them again in order to ensure she gets to have the last word in any conversation, she’s attempting to work up her connections at Rolling Stone so that she can be brought in from the cold, since at the moment, they’re just giving her the occasional opportunity to be a piecemeal contributor. I would observe that the publication has fallen quite low to settle for the scraps of Mercante’s knee-jerk liberal reactionary material, but given that this is the same outlet that had Mattress Girl as a mascot until that whole story got the greatest of all disinfectants, TRUTH, shone down on it, can we really be all that surprised that they’re willing to give the benefit of the doubt to yet another duplicitous figure like Mercante when she comes a’calling?

This Is Starting to Seem Familiar….

Between the sense of superiority, the nutcase diehard fandoms, and the increasing difficulty (or rather, cost in real dollars) in actually interacting with these personalities as they grow in audience size and impact, a lot of these streamers, especially in the geopolitical/socio-political spaces have taken on a quality that is starting to remind me a little of the very same mainstream celebrity figures that have become the absolute bane of pop culture. That is to say, they eventually take on many of the very same facets of presentation and attitude that made a lot of folks like myself turn away in disgust from those figures in the first place. Put succinctly, we got tired of being treated like completely replaceable peons and butts in seats for their benefit and little more. Certainly I’ve gotten to that point with several of them. I get it, everybody needs to eat and pay their bills, but that everybody includes the members of the audience, and I’m never going to part with dollars that I need in order to keep my wife and kids fed, clothed, and with a roof over their heads.

The fact that many of these figures don’t seem to comprehend how much like those celebrities they have become is almost pitiable, particularly for the ones who have plenty of fans and revenue coming their way, but who seem to have very little else going on to recommend them as decent human beings. I would posit that this is why I still watch SmashJT regularly, though I don’t participate at all in his chats; he remains a well-meaning guy, a family man who understands his duties and obligations as a father and husband before his online streaming persona and shows. Moreover, there is a sense of sincerity to him that is almost entirely absent in many of his contemporaries. Will I eventually stop watching his shows too? Yes, most likely, though it will probably be more due to my own personal preference than down to anything he does in terms of presentation or attitude.

But let’s take a look at the mirrored attitudes of the mainstream pop culture cretins and their up-and-coming online streaming counterparts. Actors like Pedro Pascal and journo-rats like Mercante dub their ideological opposition a bunch of ‘ists’ and ‘phobes’ and ‘stochastic terrorists’, painting them all with the same broad brush. Those who don’t directly and loudly oppose them, but who shrug and say, ‘meh, not for me’, are labeled as ‘dumb’ and ‘broke’ and ‘uneducated/unsophisticated’. The online streamers of modest and climbing size are starting to do the same damned thing with their audiences, and it leaves me to wonder the following:

When will stream viewers finally flip them the middle finger and point out that they’re starting to act just like the Old Guard figures that YouTube, Rumble, Kick and Twitch personalities were supposed to supplant?