YouTube Nonsense

I was hoping I’d have something interesting to discuss in terms of what I watched this week, but things are very much the same as they were last week. We’ve made it through another season of Grey’s, and outside of that… Youtube has been in a bit of a summer doldrums period for me.

I also feel a little bit like I poisoned myself by getting caught up in watching a bunch of “drama” on Youtube back in May, and nothing has really been the same since. It’s wild to me that it’s been 3 months since all of that started. Where does the time go?

There’s a superstitious part of myself that is very hesitant to discuss any of it in definitive terms; I blame the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” for that. I’m certainly not tweeting “death to” anyone, but it seems like the nature of the internet sometimes is that you’re basically wishing that on someone if you’re part of the “Toxic Gossip Train” that’s tearing along focusing on all of the bad things about someone.

I do think it’s funny how I come across things sometimes though.

We’re big fans of YouTube essays in this household (I used to think it was weird to call them essays, since I wasn’t the one reading them, but, that’s pretty much what they are). We went to a whole panel about them when we were at CONvergence a month ago. There’s something rewarding about sitting down and engaging with that kind of information, whether it’s something philosophical, or something that’s maybe a little silly. We follow at least two lawyers, a couple of philosophers, film fanatics, and video game lovers, just to name a few.

The tangential cousin of YouTube essays are commentary channels. Those come in a host of different formats, some more reactionary, others pretty informational, possibly bleeding into the essay realm. But, commentary tends to have a more salacious edge to it. Commentary YouTube relies more on the algorithm, which relies on engagement, which relies on outrage; or at least it seems to a decent amount of the time.

We watch a mix of essays and commentary. Sometimes it sways more heavily in the philosophical side, and other times, we find a new channel and end up going down a rabbit hole of their catalog and watching commentary on all manner of things. It’s nice when you can find a middle ground between the two, especially with someone who has a pretty extensive back catalog, and that’s how we ended up spending a solid weekend early last year watching videos from iilluminaughtii. In terms of watching someone do takedowns on MLMs or showing off the seedy underbelly of corporations, it was very satisfying. Until it wasn’t. Eventually, we sort of gave up on watching after key words in her subjects would be mispronounced for the entirety of the videos, over entire series. Then in May, she called out another YouTuber we occasionally watch for plagiarizing her style, and I ended up going down a drama channel rabbit hole; I think I have yet to fully exit that particular warren of the internet.

I don’t know what it is about gossip that is so satisfying to my brain. What is it that makes something just a little bit nasty so appealing to discuss, or watch other discuss? Drama channels were like a junk food binge for my brain, and I could not get enough of them, to the point that I pretty much poisoned my own YouTube recommendation algorithm into thinking I wanted to know drama about everything on the internet, when really it was just this. Until it wasn’t.

I think just as the iilluminaughtii hype was starting to die down, allegations resurfaced about Colleen Ballinger, and then it started all over again. I watched full documentaries on the subject, hours long livestreams going through other people’s videos, and practically daily updates on the subject. For awhile, it felt like something new and terrible was coming out every 12 hours or so.

And then, the “hi” video was released, and my drama and commentary YouTube algorithms lost their collective minds.

For me personally, having watched multiple people calling out for comment or an apology, while others rehashed how everything had gotten to this point; that ukelele video was a weirdly cathartic experience. Was it the reaction anyone wanted? No. Did it generate a mountain of content for me to watch in the immediate aftermath? Absolutely!

The wake of that video has also been frustrating, because it sucked up all of the air for a little while, and every “sordid” or “disreputable” story afterward has felt pretty lame in comparison. Now, I scroll through my recommendations and unless it’s a name I know, I’m not that concerned with checking anything out on a subject I’m unfamiliar with.

I keep joking that I poisoned my brain with all of this, but it does feel a bit like I decided to go swimming in some toxic waste and I’m not feeling so great in the aftermath of that. I suppose this is the result of relishing in the “misfortune” of others. It’s just that schadenfreude can be so satisfying, especially when you see it happening to someone who very clearly harmed others; and when there are a lot of instances where that doesn’t happen.

I’m hopeful this will be my last foray into drama YouTube for a little while, because it’s not great to be perpetually caught up in what amounts to gossip a lot of the time.