https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/737626132079362048/the-trouble-with-the-rise-of-the-youtube-video
Trascript
The trouble with the rise of the YouTube Video Essayist™ is that everybody wants to be the next Defunctland or Hbomberguy, but all the wannabes know is how to be an influencer, so the resulting video essays are always really about themselves. You’ll get a forty-five-minute video with maybe fifteen minutes of actual, topical information padded out with half an hour of tedious theatrics about how hard it was to do research for the video and how nobody wanted to talk to them, and I’m just sitting here like “yeah, dude, it was hard because you don’t know how to perform research, and nobody wanted to talk to you because your behaviour toward your prospective sources amounted to borderline harassment, and that’s how it looks in your own version of events which has clearly been spun for optics – I can’t even imagine how badly you must have gone about this in reality”.
Yeah this is the worst video essay I've ever watched in full. Dude was a creep and he made numerous rookie research mistakes. Truly incredible.
The whole "research" was a reverse image search, then checking the internet archive for the earliest date the gif was posted, then he forgot to check the history of the one website that most looked like the original source and spammed reddit for help until someone pointed him to that same page
The rest was complaining how hard researching is
It wasn't one reverse image search, it was hundreds 💀
The worst possible way to do it, since a huge number of the images were in fact identical.
For his own sake, I hope he was lying about that for clout.