Tuber’s Digest #1: BuzzFeed is Worth It
Last week on YouTube: An adult played Roblox. Contraband content appeared. Morgan & Morgan finally said "we love analog horror."
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I’m starting this newsletter to talk about YouTube. All of the links that follow are certified gold leads retrieved after hours of bone-crushing internet labor. Now let’s tube!!!
An adult played Roblox
Hall of Fame streamer Jerma985 finally played Roblox, creating one of the few introductions to the platform that may appeal to decrepit millennials. The event was a response to a young fan’s dubious birthday wish that the streamer play Roblox, which became an extended bit. Near the end of this stream, Jerma played a Nextbot game made by/for children where he got killed by a rampaging JPEG of himself, which feels like its own kind of lifetime achievement award.
Note that this was uploaded not by Jerma but by one of the many unofficial clip editors that have a kind of cleaning symbiosis with big streamers. It’s a law of nature that stream recordings will migrate to YouTube. It just makes sense for them to live there, where they show up in search and recommendations, instead of remaining in Twitch’s VOD dungeons, where even the memory of sunlight cannot survive. So streamers often either tolerate these fan editors or actually work out a deal with them (Cheltie, Jerma’s best-known editor, mentions a partnership).
The most amazing setup along these lines I ever heard was a claim by internet hate object WingsofRedemption that the troll channels making fun of him actually pay him kickbacks so that he won’t copyright strike them. I don’t know if that’s true.
Sometimes the same video haunts everyone’s feed
This thumbnail was an unwelcome presence in my recommendations. After seeing this thread on Twitter — out on the REAL internet — I concluded it must be one of those periodic mass hauntings where the algorithm makes the same video appear in everyone’s windows and starts howling at them to click it.
The video is a compilation of scenes that loosely fit the “dare you to shoot me” premise presented in no particular order. I wouldn’t call it satisfying. There’s some bizarre editing that the channel’s own pinned comment describes as a fruitless attempt to throw the YouTube monetization cops off their trail. Most scenes in the video were previously listed on this TVTropes entry, so I’d guess that’s the source of the research behind this and the creator’s other supercuts.
It’s mind-boggling to imagine all of the indignities suffered by this American Gangster scene on its journey from the mind of Sir Ridley Scott into a spoiler thumbnail for a YouTube video that was made badly on purpose to fool a computer. To all the creatives involved, I would sincerely like to say: no copyright intended.
The first multi-dimensional Counter-Strike player
Next-generation lunatic Counter-Strike streamer PSP1G has been transmitting some of the most powerful gameplay I’ve ever seen. In the clip above from the CS2 beta, he uses client-side console commands (which are supposed to be disabled online) to key out the skybox and replace it with a mirror of his own stream, allowing him to create layers of new replays by looking up.
In another clip, he takes advantage of a bugged(?) animation to make himself un-headshottable by looking straight up. Here he’s hitting his shots after flipping upside down. (“What are you going to do, fold your spine in half and shoot me?”) His multi-part stream intro has a lot going for it as well.
By the way, embedding a Twitch clip in substack is one of the Labours of Hercules. I wasn’t kidding about that place. The VODs locked up there are doing the hardest time there is.
The “worth it” meme is some kind of NSFW loophole
For some reason if you search the phrase “is worth it” on YouTube you will find a ton of cropped NSFW animations of game and cartoon characters. These have super thirsty thumbnails, but the actual videos are all sort of hilariously obscured and zoomed-in and packed inside SFW bookends to smuggle them past the content police. Some of these have millions of views and have been up for months. According to a garbled Know Your Meme entry this practice evolved from an older SFW meme and has been going on for some time.
The surprising thing here is maybe not the fact that you can get millions of views with “degen” thumbnails, but that YT will recommend them to random visitors searching for Minecraft mods and Lego Marvel Super Heroes videos. (Here’s an example from reddit.) Many comments mention this:
To state the obvious, YouTube does not want to be recommending this material to the Minecraft demographic. I assume someone will manually fix this soon by banning a few accounts and yelling at someone else downstairs that the Porno Detector is broken. But it’s interesting that these videos are thriving in the modern YT recommendation system seemingly just on clickthrough rates. These must have a ton of reports, bad bounce rate, etc. Does that stuff even matter?
Remembering the other Worth It
The last episode of the bygone BuzzFeed phenomenon Worth It – where two guys and their cameraman compared cheap food to expensive food – also aired earlier this month.
I hadn’t caught up on this series in years, but I’m surprised to hear that it would ever end. It could have continued until these dudes were ancient liches comparing a $100 phylactery to a $1,000,000 phylactery. It even survived a “why I left BuzzFeed” era breakup.
Anyway, this is an oddly heartwarming sendoff to a series about people eating stuff you can’t afford. It is funny that you only get a couple minutes in before the hosts start talking about how old they feel, like they’re getting past the age where you can dip the fries in the aioli yourself. The show’s thumbnail, which describes this as their “$150 FINAL MEAL,” suggests they may have been euthanized after filming.
Getting old is a real problem for what remains of BuzzFeed, though. Anyone familiar with their high-end content from around six years ago (Worth It, Unsolved, “the news”) now associates it with the ceaseless march of time and various complex emotions from outside of the conventional “BuzzFeed zone.” The site’s turn toward braindead AI content like travel guides and recipe generators suggests it would prefer everyone forget about the era where it tried to do anything other than spit up partly-digested chunks of text from elsewhere on the internet.
“Morgan and Morgan really said I love analog horror ☠️”
Analog horror YouTuber Wowman’s comment section recently erupted in ewok-style jubilation at the announcement of a new sponsor: personal injury attorneys Morgan & Morgan. This giant law firm, whose commercials (please watch that) apparently have “let’s settle this one”-level recognition in some parts of the US, now also sponsors channels focused on Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and many other games. The sponsorships go back at least to December, but seem to have attracted more attention after a Tumblr post in late March (then on Reddit).
The fan reaction isn’t that weird. Gaming channels often have a limited range of sponsors: mobile games, meal kits, gamer drinks, gamer merch, gamer snacks, ball shavers, and War Thunder. It says something about gaming marketing that the audience is thrilled even to see an acknowledgment that they are human enough to be personally injured.
I was thinking about this earlier this month when watching Evo Japan, one of the year’s biggest fighting game tournaments. The main sponsors were all on-the-nose: Rohto-Z eyedrops for people who look at screens too much, the “QuickOne” convenience store chain, and Hitbox controllers for semi-pro fighting game players. There was a solid Street Fighter II commercial but it didn’t feel like the corporate world thought much of the event’s viewers.
However, all was forgiven when it was revealed that the tournament’s prizes would be presented by a huge Rohto-Z eyedrop dispenser mascot with a person inside who was clearly flying blind:
That’s brand magic. If War Thunder did this nobody would care about the lawyers.
Recent YouTube business
Discussing the above, the NYT notes that Discord “could seem benign at first”
“Love how much content there is of Tom just being slaughtered” (via youtubehaiku, comment here)
This cursed Halo mod looks incredible
Nintendo continues to abuse YouTube’s copyright system and piss everyone off
Another teaser for Bloodborne Kart
Master Chief is giving out life advice on an AI channel, which uses ElevenLabs voice and ChatGPT-ish scripts to infringe on Gianni Matragrano’s turf
In 2010, the NBA’s official YouTube account commented on some very stupid Runescape videos; redditor u/catmoon has a convincing theory about a mandatory account handoff
Thanks for reading
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