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.
This isn't a counterpoint. Contra isn't publishing nothing because she has just so much intellectual integrity and has covered every relevant issue so thoroughly that more publications would surely fall into redundancy. Even ignoring that most of her work centers on fantastical, avante-garde storylines, one would need to ascribe to her an astonishingly narrow range of topics to conclude she's done it all.
She could actually fucking read Marx, for a start.
She could actually fucking read Marx, for a start.
She'd probably go "oh shit this is dangerous for my lifestyle, death to communism", I think
I definitely agree with you here.
There's a reason why Breadtube is largely cultural critique and that's at least in large part because the culture is always going to produce something new for a cultural critic to respond to. If your channel and area of specialisation is in, say, Carribbean independence movements then there's only going to be a very limited amount of content to mine by comparison. This is also the reason why streamers always end up doing react content - it's relatively easy to produce and it's a virtually infinite resource.
The old quote "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter" comes to mind.
Making something long is easy, just cover every point you might conceivably want to talk about, and read off your first draft.
Making something concise, coherent, engaging, focused, informative, and clear, on the other hand, often takes many revisions.
20k a month for saying "I like my treats and that's why tankies are wrong"
Death to america
Over 21k members with minimum tier being 2 means Contra makes over 40k a month.
I won't lie, I really hate the upper class of content creators. Especially with how quickly they become pro capitalism, if they ever pretended not to be.
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spoiler so as not to spoil joke. these are actually vegan, I think. "Natural and Artificial Flavor" could be genuine animal product but otherwise it's bread in a tube lol
Ingredients: Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Water, Soybean and Palm Oil, Sugar, Hydrogenated Palm Oil, Baking Powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Vital Wheat Gluten, Dextrose, Fractionated Palm Oil, Salt, Potassium Chloride, Xanthan Gum, Mono and Diglycerides, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Preservatives (TBHQ, citric acid), Beta Carotene (for color).
I know Three arrows does some sort of podcast patreon subscribers can listen to, so maybe that's where they are getting their money's worth?
I think, in some cases at least, what slows videos down is the added quality of research or production most creators invest in after getting popular. In many ways it's also the creative mind sometimes needing some direction a producer gives in general media, and not having that lets them just go absolutely wild is useless work that ends up being scrapped. I might be a bit charitable though because I only followed a few breadtubers, there may be many more that are just grifting.
Personally what intrigues me the most about breadtubers is how they become mild and inoffensive versions of themselves after becoming popular/well-off. Like, what causes that? Is it that the societal problems they criticized no longer applies to them? Is it the allure of advertising money? Is it secret CIA threats? I really do wonder.
I think Shaun still keeps to the same type of content, which is probably why I still bother watching what he puts out.
In many ways it's also the creative mind sometimes needing some direction a producer gives in general media, and not having that lets them just go absolutely wild is useless work that ends up being scrapped
Hbomb
Personally what intrigues me the most about breadtubers is how they become mild and inoffensive versions of themselves after becoming popular/well-off. Like, what causes that? Is it that the societal problems they criticized no longer applies to them? Is it the allure of advertising money? Is it secret CIA threats? I really do wonder.
Their rage against the machine cools off when the machine starts treating them well
Personally what intrigues me the most about breadtubers is how they become mild and inoffensive versions of themselves after becoming popular/well-off. Like, what causes that? Is it that the societal problems they criticized no longer applies to them? Is it the allure of advertising money? Is it secret CIA threats? I really do wonder.
The same exact cause for hungry as fuck "progressives" like AOC to settle and water down and tiptoe away from their original mission: They've switched classes and, therefore, their new class interests are in conflict with their original mission. What's there to be hungry about anymore when you start being fed really well? Why continue trying to destroy the status quo when it's benefiting you materially? This is why it's important to maintain loyalties to class interests (in this case, the interests of the proletariat), instead of individuals who are susceptible to corruption. China does this very well and provides the blueprint.
I understand your point, but I find a bit hard to believe they suddenly have the opposite class consciousness considering they are still much, much further away from anyone that actually owns the means of production. And simply put, they should know better.
they should know better
Sure, if they were actually communists. Most of them were always libs, but they used to be radlibs. Its clear that people like hbomberguy and contrapoints have never actually read Marx.
I don't think its a coincidence that Abi Thorne is one of the only major original breadtubers who has read marx and also keeps uploading consistently. I don't watch her videos anymore but she obviously has read a lot of theory
I know Three arrows does some sort of podcast patreon subscribers can listen to, so maybe that's where they are getting their money's worth?
I did have a check there and he has put out 4 podcast episodes in the past year.
Compare that to, say, Citations Needed, TrueAnon, Radio War Nerd, SocialismForAll, The Deprogram and it absolutely pales in comparison.
I think, in some cases at least, what slows videos down is the added quality of research or production most creators invest in after getting popular. In many ways it's also the creative mind sometimes needing some direction a producer gives in general media, and not having that lets them just go absolutely wild is useless work that ends up being scrapped. I might be a bit charitable though because I only followed a few breadtubers, there may be many more that are just grifting.
This was my urge when it came to Folding Ideas because imo his stuff is some of the absolute best quality work to come out of Breadtube; it's insightful, it's well researched and well produced, it goes into topics that are either novel to the left or he approaches them from a novel angle etc. and so I'm pretty sympathetic towards him but... he's done exactly the same thing that I've described.
I agree that having a producer can be really important but if you're pulling in decent cash then surely you would be able to bring someone on for this role.
Personally what intrigues me the most about breadtubers is how they become mild and inoffensive versions of themselves after becoming popular/well-off. Like, what causes that? Is it that the societal problems they criticized no longer applies to them? Is it the allure of advertising money? Is it secret CIA threats? I really do wonder.
Lmao yes. I didn't touch on this because I didn't want to turn my post into a litany of complaints but there's definitely that turn you see in most content creators where their edge gets blunted and their positions mellow out spontaneously. I honestly think that it's about trying to be as appealing and inoffensive to their audience/potential audience as possible but who really knows?
I think Shaun still keeps to the same type of content, which is probably why I still bother watching what he puts out.
Of the Breadtubers, I will still watch Folding Ideas, Shaun, and Hbomberguy if they put out something on a topic which captures my interest and all three of them have always been pretty glacial with their output so, although I feel more charitable towards them because of that fact, I think that they're also guilty of the same phenomenon.
That being said, you could make an argument in defence of these creators because they have pretty much always been slow to release content and at least patrons knew what they were getting when they decided to support these creators. Whether that excuses this or not however is probably a matter of personal perspective.
(Remember when Shaun used to be Shaun and Jen? Pepperidge Farm remembers...)
Thinking about it, it probably has to do with having that income secured. If they could have done so they'd probably have worked at the current speeds since the beginning, but youtube only pays you for videos you put out (and most views come from the first few days after release) so they probably felt an urge to get content out there that no longer exists.
You can probably find examples like this on many other parts of the content creator world, I'm conjecture it's a common thing.
Didn't folding ideas take a huge break due to their massive work being paid about the same as reactor #234?
You can probably find examples like this on many other parts of the content creator world, I'm conjecture it's a common thing.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest but tbh I don't have a clue about the rest of the content creation world, aside from what is implicitly materialist or explicitly Marxist so yeah.
Didn't folding ideas take a huge break due to their massive work being paid about the same as reactor #234?
I don't follow Folding Ideas closely so I wouldn't know but that's another thing I'd be inclined to believing.
It is hard to keep up revolutionary ferver for multiple videos a week when you got a mortgage to pay and making fun of disney movies does so much better numbers
You can do inoffensive fun content without telling people voting blue will save the world.
It's not just Breadtube. This is a chemistry Youtuber I've been following since 2015. At the very beginning, he averaged more than one video a week. Then it became two videos a month, then a video a month, then a video every two months, and now this. At this point, he mostly posts shorts and B-footage where he's not even doing chemistry. Or how about the gamer Youtuber Superbunnyhop? Ten years ago, he averaged at least two videos a month, then the same thing happened. His last video is over 9 months ago, he has a podcast that's apparently on hiatus, and his last Patreon is over a year old.
This is just the Youtuber playbook. You start out just making videos as a hobby, it becomes a side gig as you grind out videos and invest your video earnings into better equipment and editing software, and it becomes big enough that you can go full time. At a certain point, you use your platform to either pivot towards a podcast or livestream that has less overhead, requires less effort, and is less susceptible to writer's block due to being topical while still getting passive income from your past videos or you semi-retire and coast on your passive income while pushing out two videos a year so people know you haven't fully retired.
Contrapoints et al are semi-retired. They're not going to produce the rate they used to because they're not working full time anymore. It's like someone going from making $200k/yr to $100k/yr but they only have to show up in the office half the time. They can coast in semi-retirement because enough rubes are willing to throw money at them. I think Contra and most Breadtubers suck, but they suck because of their pre-retirement and semi-retirement content, not because they're seizing an opportunity at early retirement.
Yeah the NileRed -> "here's a short showing ferrofluid cause it'll get 2mil views on tiktok" and "I spent $5k buying a bunch of NIST certified testing ingredients and clumsily mashing them in a beaker to make the world's shittiest 'purest' cookie" clickbait videos pipeline has been tragic but I suppose in all honesty, even as a certified chemist, there's only so much chemistry reaction/synthesis content you can do before you either start extracting DMT with naptha for views or eventually start getting visits from your local PD or kill yourself converting motor oil into chewing gum or something.
But 100% agree it is the general Youtuber playbook. HBomberguy is another example - although I am more willing to give creators like him & FoldingIdeas (and even ones who aren't really pushing patreons/podcasts/etc but instead trying to build an actual documentary career, like Defunctland, and as a result take like a year between videos) more leeway because A.) Their videos usually are feature-film length and well-researched, but also very niche genres/topics so it is understandably hard to find topics to discuss at length & B.) If they do have patreons, they're usually posting stuff to it and they're typically like $1-5 for all the content excluding like the bullshit 'get your name in my video credits' or 'get access to my discord'. But again, Hbomberguy has 13,000 patreons and even at his cheapest $2/mo tier, that's $26k/mo so like $300k/year and he last posted a video to Youtube in Nov 2022 & has made 3 Patreon posts since then, one being an hour long video about Myst for backers and the other being the first 90 minutes of his next upcoming video.
Feel like there are like three (maybe more, but I'm on my lunch break and not trying to spend the entirety posting on Hexbear about youtubers) well-tread paths a Youtuber can take these days:
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A: The Patreon-less sponsor-funded route with an actual team of people working under/for you. (I'm thinking Tom Scott, Wendover Productions, etc) I'm imagining usually that most of these creators aren't making a TON of money but they're usually the ones getting invited to places by like Bill Gates to record videos about stuff that few other creators will ever have a chance at getting access to, so they see consistent revenue from Youtube and sponsors as a result & that can build into doing stuff outside of the platform like Tom Scott's various BBC stuff.
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B: The Patreon-centric route where it is typically just the creator and maybe various editors/writers/camerapeople they hire as needed for videos. They're making a bunch usually on Patreon and this eventually shows in equipment, editing software, etc like you've mentioned. Videos tend to taper off but they release as needed to keep the Patreon money flowing or try other things like podcasting, etc.
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C: The "I'm just doing this for fun really" creator who invariably gets millions of subs from their genuinely interesting/well-shot videos. KiwamiJapan, Rescue & Restore, Histocrat, etc who all likely have actual jobs or other hobbies, post like the wind (which can come and go in frequency, as wind does), and don't really seem to care about monetization or sponsors.
I've been thinking about these Youtubers, and I think like you said, it boils down to whether they have a life outside of Youtube, career-wise and artistic-wise. Videos made by people trying to be Youtubers as a career path just feels different. There's also a case where a content creator is focused to another site, usually Twitch or Tiktok, but has a Youtube channel for highlights. Those videos also feel pretty different.
These Youtube channels are from people who have lives outside of Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/@Aliantos/
https://www.youtube.com/@sci-inspi/
https://www.youtube.com/@11foot8plus8/
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And 99 percent of those podcasts are just incoherent stream of conscious ramblings that could be edited down to 10 minutes of worthwhile content There's at best one person there you want ro hear from while some #2 constantly interrupts with unfunny jokes.
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
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
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 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.
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.
If people wanted to do this, they would've already done so.
I wouldn't deny it.
I don't think them donating to BreadTube would stop them from doing so.
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.
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
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".
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...
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.
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."
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.
Sounds like your complaints are more about the audience that certain youtubers attract more so than the youtubers themselves.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is something that is way beyond the scope of what I originally criticised.
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
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.
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.
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.
anybody has ever claimed that BreadTube was an educational project to further advance the working class' struggles
Even people here did sometimes, some of those people were me (though from an infotainment angle which challenges the ideological hegemony a bit).
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
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.
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I'm not about to dox myself lol.
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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.
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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?
Three arrows is like a spd voter who lived in america for three years and comes from Freiburg the erewhon of Germany. Of course hes no comrade. Contrapoints meanwhile only briefly flirted with leftism, when she was on her lowest point financially and during her transition, once she moved into a more financial stable as well as more “cis-perceived” position she ditched leftist thought immediately.
I gotta be honest with you. If I see someone touting the three arrows I treat them with suspicion because they either don't know their history or, worse yet, they do know their history.
After what the SPD did in the twilight of the Weimar Republic I find it difficult to understand anyone who would proudly use their symbols. This is especially relevant when we're discussing a German historian, of all people.
Agreed, like how could you live in Germany as a honest leftist and be pro-spd? Like they are reliable anti-worker, even today they are responsible for destroying the living standard of Germanys working class.
There's a lot about Three Arrows that I've never been able to reconcile.
I get that there are good reasons for hiding your power level: you might want to avoid the feds (learn from JT), you might want to avoid being effectively blacklisted by employers (learn from Marxist Paul), you might want to avoid malicious trolls (learn from BayArea415), you might be savvy enough to realise that fascism is on the rise in the western world and you don't want to find your name on their list. Or you might want to make your stuff as palatable to your audience either to extend the reach of your message or because you're chasing Patreon bucks. I respect the hustle. But there's a big difference between playing it down with regards to your political position as a public figure and openly being a comprador.
I might be misremembering here but I reckon that Three Arrows goes in on anti-communism and promotes a message about how communists go "too far".
For a person who ought to know very well how the SPD half-measures played out historically, that's an interesting line to take especially when you're making videos about how the current political situation is rapidly devolving into fascism and how the conditions of today are increasingly mirroring those of the Weimar Republic.
For a person who ought to know how the SPD collaborated with the Nazis and facilitated their rise to power, not to mention the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, it's an even more interesting position to take.
As far as I'm aware, the SPD is really just another milquetoast "left-leaning" party (insofar as they aren't as rightwing as the other major parties) these days so to support them today is another interesting line to take.
I get that the whole schtick of accusing any and every SocDem of killing Rosa is really overplayed, especially if we're talking about some American who just wants universal healthcare and doesn't know shit about Rosa Luxemburg, but Three Arrows has always thrown up a lot of red flags for me tbh.
He does. The SPD has a VERY long and VERY consistent history of betraying the working class every election cycle. Thats why his continued support of them made me immediately suspicious.
I immediately knew she was grifting when she said 'I don't think I need to read any more old white men, I've read insert list of completely unrelated liberal philosophy authors when I was studying for my PhD.' This was really early on to.
No investigation, no right to speak.
don't misgender trans people, even if they're shitlibs. she uses she/her.
Old White men Leslie Feinberg, Mae Zedong, Rosa Luxemburg, Skollontai, Thomas Sankara, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh
Old White men, famously the people that whites have invented slurs for.
Contraptions is useless, Breadtube's videos "explaining" Marx are less than useless.
That's a good question.
I've had a look from behind the paywall and she seems to be releasing vlog style videos about once a month. I can't tell how long they are or what the production values are like but going by the titles it looks like stuff where she is just chatting about the Barbie movie, the new atheist movement, her experience with psychedelics as well as releasing outtakes from the videos released on her YouTube channel.
It's fair to say that she isn't doing nothing but still, she seems to be bringing in big cash for pretty minimal content.
I think she also does livestreams where she plays video games or something (Shaun does this too)
she's fairly open about the fact that she hasn't wanted to be the Big Politics Video Essayist for a while and just wants to do like makeup vlogs and stuff.
She usually asks people on twitter what topic they want her to chat about
Conttrapoints is the worst ofnthese IMO. She used to make short, edited videos that have the same amount of useful content as the 1.5 hour slogs she makes now. I can tolerate a lib if they're doing fun shit, but it stopped being fun years ago
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.
I don't think this is limited to breadtubers. I've seen this with patreons in general, indie game dev patreons when the content is released piecemeal over time on a monthly schedule where they get more and more and more setbacks that make the content release later and later. Over time it decreases to updates once every few months, then twice a year. It seems to be a problem with the source of income being too guaranteed and boredom with the project setting in. They don't really want to be doing it anymore.
