So I think we already know the outlines of the typical criticisms of Breadtube, namely that it's vaguely-leftist content that focuses on cultural critique and gives a nod to socialist theory here and there but it doesn't actually achieve anything and it's just a media-consumption demographic with no moves towards anything that resembles on the ground organising and activism. (Obviously there are a few outliers but as a rule this generally holds true.)
I dipped out of Breadtube years ago for plenty of reasons but I just posted on Lemmygrad criticising the SPD Three Arrows movement which prompted me to have a look at the Breadtuber Three Arrows and they have done exactly the same thing that Contrapoints and a lot of other large figures in this genre have done:
They build up a healthy Patreon base and then their content drops off to like a couple of videos a year, if that, while continuing to draw off a personal salary which rivals that of a full-time worker.
In the past two years Three Arrows has produced 4 videos, amounting to less than 4.5 hours of runtime all up.
That's staggering for someone who is getting over 60k a year, at the most conservative estimate.
Likewise Contrapoints claimed to be getting 20k a month and she's putting out like 1-2 videos a year. And there's plenty of other examples of this too.
Imagine what could be done if people supported their local grassroots organisations instead of paying boatloads of cash for their twice-yearly YouTube treats smh.
Disclaimer: I've never watched any BreadTube in my life
I think you're looking at BreadTube from a wrong angle. You seem to judge it as a socialist project when you should be judging it as entertainment
I could be wrong about this next part but I don't think anybody has ever claimed that BreadTube was an educational project to further advance the working class' struggles. Youtuber making videos and their fans voluntarily supporting them with donations isn't a grift because the Youtuber hasn't claimed that it will help the class struggle or help bring forth communism
If people wanted to do this, they would've already done so. I don't think them donating to BreadTube would stop them from doing so. Not to mention the donations are so geographically distributed that if these donations did go to local grassroots orgs instead it'd probably be negligible amounts
I don't disagree overall with your response but I'm not really sure where you're coming from by saying that I'm approaching Breadtube as a socialist project.
I was just giving mention to the obvious criticisms of Breadtube that are already out there before moving on to my point, which is that many of the largest creators seem to accumulate a big Patreon base before basically dipping out of creating content save for a couple of videos per year.
I know this is gonna come off as a "look it up, bro - it's true!!" response but it's a really common refrain from within the hardcore fanbases of Breadtubers and streamerbros for fans to claim that "they've done more for the left than anyone else." This comes up as one of the first defences of people like Vaush, Keffals, and especially Beau of the Fifth Column. With Beau, if I ever come across someone who supports him, I point out that they're supporting a convicted human trafficker and it's usually a 50/50 chance they'll resort to this defence straight off the bat. They will also often repeat this refrain in their echo-chambers about how tankies are completely insignificant and how their favourite content creator has done more for the left than tankies ever have (yet simultaneously, they'll claim tankies are so disproportionate in their influence that they're ruining socialism for everyone else. Odd how tankies are so weak and yet so strong at the same time 🤔🤔)
I wouldn't recommend engaging with these people but if you do then it becomes pretty obvious that it's not just a parasocial relationship they have with their favourite YouTubers but it's also kinda like a parapolitical or para-activist relationship they have with them as well.
I wouldn't deny it.
I'm of a different opinion here. I think with the diehard believers they really do have a sort of false consciousness and they believe that they're funding something that's greater than infotainment and because of that they're less likely to put their donations towards something which is politically impactful.
Maybe. But a ton of orgs run on a shoestring and even if it was only in the most populous cities in the west like New York and LA and London, if the money from places like that were going to grassroots orgs instead of Patreon I think it would make a significant difference.
But then again there's absolutely no way of proving this claim since no-one but Patreon would have the demographic data of patrons and the amount they donate so this is pure speculation.
I guess I'm trying to say I don't understand how it's a grift? Again, I don't watch any of them but it doesn't seem like these youtubers are scamming or manipulating their viewers and people are voluntarily donating money to support them. The fans can also cancel their donations at any time if they're unhappy with the amount of content the youtuber is putting out
I feel like if the youtubers were making apolitical content this post wouldn't have been made, and it's only because they're making "socialist" content that makes it feel like a grift because there's a higher standard assigned to it. Whether that standard is morality, expectations of helping the working class, etc.
Idk it's 4AM and I ate 1 meal today I might not be thinking straight or making any sense haha
I think that I'm making a subtle conceptual distinction here between a grift and a scam which is why we aren't on the same page.
Astrology is a grift while Young Living is a scam imo. An astrologer is going to work hard to draw up a birth chart for you and to develop a report based on interpreting this chart and they'll provide you with a personalised consultation explaining all of this. It's hard work. But it's a grift because ultimately it's selling bullshit.
Young Living is an MLM that scams sellers out of money and sells overpriced essential oils with bogus health claims and fearmongering.
In a grift, people are still getting what they are paying for but in a scam it's ripping people off blind. An insurance scam is selling people a policy that is essentially nonexistent whereas the insurance industry itself is a grand societal grift under capitalism, if that makes sense.
So a YouTuber grift would be to foster parasocial relationships to cash in on them or to do anti-tankie content or to go down the tried-and-true "Why I left the left" route. All of them take varying degrees of hard work to pull off but ultimately it's peddling convenient bullshit. That's why I think this falls into grift territory; Keffals is on an anti-tankie, why I left the left grift. She scammed people out of donations towards her non-existent "legal fund".
Absolutely.
I really don't bother to turn my attention towards liberals much, beyond what is forced into my attention, because I don't believe that they deserve my time.
It's also worth noting that I'm speaking about what I know. I'm really not familiar with other content creators besides Breadtube except for that which is implicitly materialist (e.g. Citations Needed, Radio War Nerd) or explicitly Marxist. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is representative of a larger trend but I'm completely unfamiliar with the rest of it so it's not my place to speak about it.
Ultimately if liberals are grifting and getting grifted I'm going to laugh or shake my head and that's about as far as I'll go with it. If there are scams I feel an obligation to denounce them regardless of where they come from because of the nature of them. But at the same time, if there's a grift on the left then I feel like I have an obligation to speak out against it because it's something that exploits people who are important to me so you're right in that there is a moral imperative here but it's less about the fact that I'm assigning higher standards to the creator themselves and more because I'm assigning a higher importance to the people who are/could be targets of the grift.
Ah I understand now, you've explained it really well
BreadTube is totally grifting Western leftists
Sounds like your complaints are more about the audience that certain youtubers attract more so than the youtubers themselves.
Like, I agree that this is a believable interaction, but the question I would have to ask is why are we assigning so much weight to the opinions of randos on the internet?
I mean, I certainly understand the frustration that comes from these kinds of interactions. But you also need to keep in mind that people who are nuanced and put a lot of thought into their positions/opinions aren't the people who are loudly posting their bad takes. The people who are doing that tend to be opinionated and arrogant, and as a result trying to have a discussion with them can be frustrating and feel like you're talking to a brick wall. But that's also the majority of opinions and argumentation that you're going to see being shared, because that kind of axiomatic and simplistic world view is the easiest kind to share. You don't have to lay out the ground work for why you believe something is true, you just proclaim that it is true and double down when challenged.
The thing is, you shouldn't be addressing those people directly. If you're replying to/challenging a person like this, you should be writing your response for the benefit of the audience who will be reading that exchange, and you should be responding with the presumption that the bulk of people are not the arrogant and opinionated person you're replying to and that they would appreciate being introduced to an opposing viewpoint.
Now, if you're going to a place such as a dedicated discord or subreddit for a specific content creator, depending on how that community developed it's possible that all of the reasonable people have left those communities and the only people left are the "true believers," so to speak. But you have to keep in mind that the people who will join a community and regularly post in that community is usually a tiny fraction of the overall audience for a given content creator. And that can still end up being hundreds or thousands of people jumping into your replies when you criticize their darling content creator, but that doesn't necessarily indicate any widely held sentiment among an audience more broadly. It just indicates that some randos on the internet have bad takes, and those randos happen to be part of those communities. Whereas the majority of a given audience is probably mostly "normal," and don't have their identity invested into their favorite content creator in nearly the same way.
Like, this kind of complaint feels akin to what conservatives like to do where they sift through the discourse™️ in order to find the most cringey arguments that they can scrape off of tumblr, often posts from literal children/teenagers, and then sharing memes with "TRIGGERED" as the caption and pretending that those memes represent "The Left." Or it feels like the Ben Shapiro special where he picks "debates" with random college freshmen that he can mock and talk over to show how pathetic "The Left" is, instead of finding someone who can put forward the strongest and most well thought out version of a position and debating them on fair terms. Yeah, Ben Shapiro can talk down to people half his age who haven't fully developed their political beliefs yet and make them look foolish, and yeah, we can pick out random fans of a specific content creator and talk about how bad their takes are. But neither of those things tell us anything meaningful about the larger population, and there isn't any reason why the opinions of randos should be treated as indicating anything significant or meaningful.
I suppose you could make the argument that in the case of content creators that you get the community that you cultivate, but even in that case the more meaningful criticism would be to break down what a creator is doing that would cultivate an audience like that. The existence of online randos having bad takes is not itself significant or meaningful.
I think it would be helpful to just take a step back and reframe your experience, starting with the understanding that most people are reasonable, reachable, and teachable. And then approach these interactions with the understanding that the people posting inflammatory takes and who immediately become defensive in response to criticism aren't the people you are trying to reach, but they will be the people you encounter online the most because they are the most likely people to share their opinion and to respond to criticism. Either adapt your response with the understanding that your intended audience is all of the people who will be reading that exchange and that your intended audience is not the person you are responding to specifically, or step away from online discourse altogether and focus your outreach/persuasion on people in your actual life where you can have face-to-face discussions instead of semi-anonymous flame wars.
Breadtube is (largely) an audience curated identity. Like, there were a bunch of videos about trying to make it more than that, but it was primarily about the community (of mostly radlibs) the audience created. I think it's better to analyse it from that perspective more than from creators. That said, we are talking about creators behaviour in this thread, so idk. It feels very similar to me like fan fiction communities (I was going to say marvel fans, but Disney has much more control over what does and doesn't count as marvel)
I've already addressed a lot of what you've brought up in a reply further down in this comment thread before you commented so I'm going to try and keep this brief to avoid relitigating the same points that I made prior to you writing this comment.
I'm criticising the structural trend that exists as I see it and I'm doing so because I think that it's exploitative of people on the left which is why I'm bothering to even mention it in the first place.
Like I said, this is about the hardcore fanbase and as such the implication is pretty clear that it's not intended to be representative of the entire viewership of a channel. I stated directly that this is my own anecdotal experience and it's not like I was trying to pass this off as ethnographic research or anything like that.
But if we make the assumption that the hardcore fanbase is most likely to donate then this is why their opinions are salient to that part of the discussion and it's also worth noting that I am only responding to this in regard to the prior point that was made further up that nobody thinks that Breadtube is anything beyond infotainment.
My argument is simply that this is not what is commonly held as true amongst the hardcore fanbase.
I don't disagree but I also don't understand why you're assuming that I don't already know this or why it's relevant.
This comes off as a pretty broad mischaracterisation of what I've said and how I've said it tbh.
I didn't even bring up the hardcore fanbase in my original post and I wasn't cherry-picking the absolute worst quotes or screenshots of a fanbase to dish out some epic owns on them publicly to prove that I am the chad and therefore they are the wojaks. Far from it. I was just relaying what I've personally seen from this cohort in a fairly neutral way so not only is it not a complaint but I really don't see how you've arrived at the conclusion that I'm pulling a Ben Shapiro here and it comes off as a bit disingenuous.
I'm not seeking to do that, I've already expressed my distaste for engaging with this demographic, and this is way off the point besides.
I'm not interested in finding a person who can best defend their positions to have a fair debate with them. I'm simply saying that this is what I've noticed.
This is something that is way beyond the scope of what I originally criticised.
I am generally not involved in these discussions directly but it's mostly what I have witnessed so I'm not really sure where the assumption is coming from that I'm directly involving myself in internet slapfights over this with the hardcore fans or that I need to approach this more objectively.
I'm well aware that commenting online is a spectator sport and you're inferring a huge amount about my intentions based on what is essentially a side note where I disagreed with a point someone made.
This feels like you're almost trying to diagnose me with some sort of problem and to provide me with advice about how I need to change my ways and what I need to focus on but it's all based on a small aside and you're making some pretty big assumptions about what I engage with, how I engage with it, what I intend to get out of it, and what I devote my time on.
I'm not seeking advice or support for this. I'm not vexed by it. I'm just recounting what I have witnessed since it's relevant to the discussion. Heck, I even explicitly said that I don't recommend engaging with these people which I think implies that it's something that I don't generally do myself and that I don't see it as a good use of time. If we take that and put it together with what I wrote in my original post, it's implied that I haven't even thought about Three Arrows for years and that it only came up incidentally, and likewise with Contrapoints, which paints a very different picture than the one you seem to have gotten from what I've said.
Even people here did sometimes, some of those people were me (though from an infotainment angle which challenges the ideological hegemony a bit).
BadEmpanada's one good video provides a counterpoint: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=23h9emj2_Rw
It seems clear that a good number of people involved think this is what "the left" is
I would have to agree. Like many of us here have said in other posts, a lot of liberal politics (lib or conservative) is vibes based. Many of these so-called 'leftist' YouTubers are nothing but liberals (being charitable I guess they're closer to DemSocs) and they've successfully carved out a niche in the media landscape. I think many people are drawn to these channels when they're first dabbling into something a little further left than they currently are, and are wanting to know more.
These channels also attract viewers that think participating in media consumption is a form of activism. Just
The content is reformist and inoffensive to the ruling class.
This is my own personal conjecture here so take it with a requisite pinch of salt but I've had more than a few occasions where the worst end of the Breadtube/Breadtube-adjacent types have goaded me in the most smug way by demanding to know what irl organising I've been engaged in.
I'm not about to dox myself lol.
I'm not doing irl work for the purposes of bragging rights or for online credibility and if that ever changes then put me out of my misery immediately, please.
But the way that they do this in such a smarmy way gives me the impression that they don't do shit when it comes to irl work and therefore they're assuming that this is the case for everyone else too. It has the same vibes as a misogynist who will say something like "Yeah but you don't actually believe in any of that stuff, do you?" because it's literally beyond their frame of reference to conceive of a person who would actually be any different to them.
Of course there's no way to prove this either way but still.
yeah those common critiques don't really work as critiques of a pretty diverse array of commentators and videographers. if we take them seriously, we find that they're actually critiques of a certain attitude towards Doing Leftism Online that confuses being entertained with being radicalized. "It's the breadtuber's fault for strangling the newborn revolution in the cot!" just doesn't make sense if you look at the contours of the social terrain we're stuck in. is the idea supposed to be that, if hbomberguy started a series where he explains Capital chapter by chapter while doing bits instead of talking about star wars or whatever, then that would revitalize the revolutionary left?