When they’re no longer able to make millions in ad revenue by enabling and promoting him. Same deal with 45 and Twitter. YouTube is complicit in his actions. He’s not just a member like you are I are on this site. He’s a profit stream for them and their parent company Alphabet.
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My older daughter was just updating me on what PewDiePie has been up to lately. The last time I paid him any attention was years ago when he was just an obnoxious kid who put up gaming videos or something. This is all so fucking weird.
If this all is a simulation, I hope the people running it are looking at the data in stunned silence.
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You may be joking, but I think there’s something to that. I’m not convinced that human beings are cognitively equipped to deal with the unfettered instantaneous two-way mass communication that social media enables. It’s the cultural equivalent of taking the control rods out of a nuclear reactor.
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Being as someone who consumes youtube instead of as much as most people consume TV content, PewDiePie is quite the enigma for me.
I watched two videos of his total and found him one of the most annoying people on the planet, You’d have to pay me vast amounts to watch his stuff.
Goes back to the usual many hours of youtube viewing per day…
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Same, but events of this week have made pretty clear that whoever he is and whatever he’s done to achieve that fame he definitely has some of the most horrible fans on the planet.
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While the ransomware was put together as a joke, sadly, it did infect a few users, ZDNet has learned.
Maybe it’s not too much to hope that this was pretty much a non-incident that ZDNet is hyping to maximum effect?
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If YouTube wants to fix this, they can just hardcode the API to return 100M subscribers to whatever bot is checking it.
Then ban him, but they won’t do that.
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Au contraire, plenty of people manage to use the internet every day without being emotionally stunted dog turds.
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He’s had Ben Shapiro on his channel. That alone is enough to damn him.
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I’ve taken to using Youtube in an incognito window. It seems to force youtube search to actually focus on the search terms instead of whatever other bullshit it wants me to find. The recommended videos in the sidebar are also far less annoying.
Sure, channel subscriptions are kind of pointless then, but I don’t see that as a problem. The subscription model annoys me. (I am subscribed to Contrapoints, though.)
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But you don’t have to be an emotionally stunted dog turd to be influenced by social media. My point is about the summing of small effects across a culture and the acceleration of messages and memes which would otherwise never have risen to the level of promulgation. It’s not necessarily a thing that an individual would even be conscious of, and I suspect it also affects people making a good-faith effort to be good netizens.
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I’m not saying you don’t have a point. But I am saying this is not a result of that point. This is a result of an asshole fan of another asshole learning Java. Their nihilistic amoral narcissist entitlement isn’t crowdsourced. It’s an integral part of who they are as individuals.
The sepsis of the internet isn’t a consequence of otherwise ordinary people being suckered in by delusions. It’s a result of intentional malicious actions by individuals and corporations.
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Does this mean we go back to BBSes? :3
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Ah! I see. I wasn’t talking specifically about this case, I was responding to dabeyc. My point works a little better in that context.
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I’m going out on a limb and guessing that the reason I don’t htink people on BBSes were toxic assholes is because I was too young to notice, and I was probably a toxic asshole myself.
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Fair enough. As I said, in general I agree with the idea that we as a society aren’t equipped for our technology, though I would argue that’s true of more than just the internet. Which is not to say we can or should revert to life without it. We can’t, and even if we could I’d be adamantly opposed to it for a lot of reasons that belong in their own thread. Instead we must evolve. Through is out, so to speak.
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Yeah. I think also they were smaller group so folks were easier to integrate to them. I’ve noticed that about MUDs way back (and still to this day). Small groups are able to handle getting new comers on board with their community or if the new comer is toxic they can eject them more easily. The modern Internet ultimately has few tools to do this.
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I don’t hold Jodi Foster accountable for the shots taken at Reagan, for example. Let’s put that at one end of the spectrum. On the other end you have some Breitbart-associated trolley who would @ someone in their Twitter feed and that person would immediately start getting death threats. Might as well have been a mob boss using an established code to instruct people to commit crimes.
I’d put pewdiepie a lot closer to the responsible end of the spectrum than the not-responsible end. I’ve never watched the stream, but has the stream ever included messages to fans about how it needs to maintain #1? Called out the T-Series stream as a competitor? Suggested fans take action to do something about it?
But as for authoritarian governments abusing this logic, the logic of authoritarians is always just a flimsy film over what they were going to do anyway. If they start arresting their political opponents for Trumped up murders that not* would be a good reason for us to get rid of murder laws.
ETA: Apparently I left that “not” out. Hope I didn’t come across as excessively sarcastic and asshole-ish.
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He already told his fans a few times to not do anything illegal. Citing specific examples when he is aware about them.
I appreciate that. At the same time I just saw Jimmy Kimmel tell viewers to definitely not follow @DevinCow on Twitter, which definitely meant the opposite. I think if pewdiepie doesn’t want to encourage people to do awful things, pewdiepie needs to figure out how to not encourage people to do awful things. If that’s too hard or not something they want to do, and they really don’t like all this, they could take the massive stacks of cash they’ve already made and walk away with them.
That’s not very charitable or fair to pewdiepie, but I figure they can take it.
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