Hey what's up guys it's Scarce here
And you can wear my sweatshirt
Alex is doing this sh**t you fucking n-
Dramaalert is f**king cancer man (glue70 - Casin plays)
YouTube in 2016 what a time to be alive we were in the
final days of an uncensored YouTube that
was still focused on the individual
still about broadcasting yourself, a time
when YouTube seemed larger than life, its
creators blown to epic proportions
becoming heroes and villains in a
never-ending spectacle of drama. It was a
time when cringy was everyone's favorite
insult and we'd gather in the comments
to collectively down that sweet Clorox
nectar. it was such a toxic time and we
knew it then too, yet I think I'm not
alone in saying that a part of me wishes
for those days again. YouTube today is
such a tame and colorless place, it's
trending tab full of mindnumbing junk for
12 year olds and utter boredom excreted
by mega corporations who tell you the
"right opinions" to think. it is an
authoritarian state of paranoia, everyone
cautiously self-censoring lest the
algorithmic overlords flag their videos
and, God forbid, demonetise them. In the
face of all this, the hysterical drama of
2016 YouTube seems a refreshing escape
an era where the focus was still on
genuine individual creators. YouTube was
booming the past few years and creators
found themselves with increasingly more
rabid audiences and therefore more power
which they would wield and learn the
hard way that, as the sage of our times
Sammyclassicsonicfan observed "your actions have consequences"
One reptilian, leafyishere, single-handedly
defined the year for the site. he rapidly
rose to fame (5 mil on Youtube in 6 months)
and fell just as hard. 2016 started at
the close of the whole fine brothers
trademark debacle, a foreshadow of
corporate nightmares to come, but for now
individual youtubers and their battles
would take center stage while the death
of the golden era of YouTube was brewing
in the back alleys. in the great YouTube
drama war leafy was playing a
reverse Italy, switching sides and
turning on former allies not because he
was losing but because he was winning
and wanted to win more and more each
time. He broke his friendship with h3h3
and feeding off the attention from the
drama he jumped on the anti dramaalert
bandwagon and turned on his longtime
partner in crime, killer keemstar
Bandwagoning, that was the defining
characteristic of 2016 YouTube, a fit
candidate for a merriam-webster word of
the year YouTube Edition. armies of pious
fans linked via hive mind, blindly
spamming hate in the name of their
respective creator. it was hate trains
from individual channels at first, most
notably the reptilian army, but then
youtubers harnessed the compliant anger of
the greater YouTube community, driving
huge unforeseen mobs to inconceivable
amounts of hate. First everyone hated
keemstar because it was the cool thing
to do and later on everyone hated leafy
because it just seemed like justified
revenge. Now this all seems pretty dumb
and ridiculous from today's perspective
and I don't seem to be making a very
compelling argument for the good old
days of 2016 YouTube but at the time it
seemed so real. I remember hurriedly trying
to finish the latest grade a under a
video about the leafy versus keemstar
drama as my mom called me down to dinner
one summer evening
it was so captivating: these youtubers
are no longer funny people who yelled
through your phone or computer screen
but rather it felt like an actual
physical conflict - the internet became
realer than real life and I believe this
is why 2016 YouTube strikes such a chord
with a lot of people. In an already
eventful time of Pokemon Go (I play pokemon go everyday)
and the u.s. election (pokemon go to the
polls) it was also an essential year to
the development of the site. No longer
was it just a place for Minecraft videos
and clickbait pranks, now with the
culmination of years of increasingly
dedicated fans, creators became not just
celebrities but figureheads of internet
culture, the dominant organisms in a
vibrant ecosystem, waging war against
each other and all that was not fit for
this YouTube society they've built. For a
brief moment leafy was a hero and
keemstar the scapegoat painted as an
objective villain, it was a classic tale
of good and evil. For a brief moment you
forgot that it was all a petty online
argument between people shouting from
their bedrooms.
you took sides and not only watch the
battles play out but you could
participate in it too, doing your duty as
a loyal keyboard warrior, and as
repulsive as all this may sound nowadays
the hyper realism and blind devotion to
your side and community that we
experienced in 2016 is still very much
memorable, and attractive in a way, the
zeitgeist of a freer time, a YouTube that
passed too soon from our grasp. Oh and I
have to mention the whole trend of
making fun of kid pop stars that people
like leafy and pyrocynical became
notorious for. While it's more or less
been forgotten now and most people can
agree that bullying kids isn't the
nicest thing to do, to me, the kids -
Jacob Sartorius, Johnny Orlando, MattyBRaps
and the like - they represented an
unfavourable direction in which internet
fame was going. Rather than the viral
sensations of the ancient internet or
the non-traditional stars that dominated
YouTube at the time, they were these
budding caricatures of celebridom:
obnoxious conventionally attracted cults
of personality who acted all tender like
they cared about love when all they
wanted was money. It was no wonder
Internet citizens flocked in swarms to
vehemently defend against this embryonic
threat and maintain the Internet as the
alternative to traditional media. Even
today sweatshirt is still receiving hate
Now I was pretty strong on this whole
hate bandwagon too, which was helped by
the fact that I was a couple years older
than most of these kids at the time and
they look like the exact kind of
numbskull chads that absolutely annoyed
me at school.
Going back to leafy, clearly his toxicity
and his habit of backstabbing former
friends and directing his ridicule at those
smaller than him wasn't a sustainable
strategy and inevitably he met his end.
idubbbz was the (Leafy: what is it the hay that
broke the camel's back; Keem: yeah) As much
as it may have benefited the website at
the time the end of leafy symbolized the
end of an era of YouTube, a place where
anyone could say anything, a livelier
time of suspense and tension, an exciting
drama of loyalty devotion and betrayal
the internet made more real than it ever
should have been
However as 2017 rolled in along came a
new foreign YouTube. With the fall of
vine in January it became a site
infested with these new materialistic
Viners that unintentionally parody
modern culture, and with mainstream news
denouncing PewDiePie as a far-right
extremist for a joke taken too far along
with efforts started the previous year
to clean up the site and make it more
vanilla, YouTube became a community
forcibly molded to be more
family-friendly and more like
traditional entertainment. The bubble of
YouTube filled, then burst, then filled
again but this time with cr*p. And that
brings us to the cesspool that is
YouTube today. The once unique site has given
way to the dulled and assimilated
platform we all know but don't love, the
only real drama now is between YouTube
itself and its own creators. Even if
you're not a Rick and Morty fan you can
see that stuff like the KSI Logan Paul
fight is completely fake to appropriate
cash from ten-year-olds' allowances and
while leafy later admitted that he to
turn on keemstar for money
(Leafy: I mean Adsense was at an all-time high
but...) the climate of the site at the time
inflated all the drama of the year into
this intense reality, keeping fans at the
edge of their seats waiting anxiously
for the next move. We can't help wishing
for this unfiltered excitement again now
that we're faced with a mundane YouTube
full of soulless channels who pander to
advertisers and young children. But 2016
was an exceptional year, a rarity that
will never happen again. The environment
today desires a completely different
approach to content, especially with
YouTube's stricter rules no channel as
toxic and uncensored as leafy's could
survive. But there was another leafy,
before his immense popularity when he
used to make clickbait-y story time
videos in what I would call his golden
era. I have kind of a special connection to
these videos and they were the reason I
never completely hated leafy even at the
height of the content cop and all his
exposed videos. I remember I'd sit down
after school on my bed and watch him
talk about getting high on Molly over
cs:go skate footage. As strange as it may
be to say, I felt a bond between us - me
and this edgy kid in his Utah bedroom. He
was like a big brother that knew all the
stuff they didn't teach you in school
and I watched him and I was happy. This
gaming story time tradition still
continues today with people like Luna
but it doesn't feel the same
Nothing can recreate what it was like to
belong to one of these channels as they
grew and sticking with them in the midst
of the flame war of YouTube drama
The sensation of genuity and community was
what truly made 2016 YouTube great and
it was also probably the largest
casualty as YouTube's evolved to cater
more towards advertisers and
corporations. The Logang, while equally as cancerous,
just doesn't have the same
intimacy between its members as the
reptilian Brotherhood. When people talk
about the last remaining decent
youtubers they're quick to mention how
these youtubers don't care about
pleasing the algorithm or jumping on
trends and how they have absolutely no
filter saying and doing with whatever
the h*ck they want but they don't so
much discuss the strong, loyal
communities around the channels.
idubbbz is widely respected and loved on
every corner of the site and whenever
you watch a cr1tikal video the rawness
creates a feeling of closeness between
you and him, and while some newer
youtubers like Zeino do a good job of
keeping this connection to their fan
base,
it's become increasingly rare as popular
YouTube channels have morphed into cold
content churning machines
hungry for the money and the clout
Which is a tragedy, because that sense of
community you'd never find with a pop
star or the actors of a TV show, that
was the real magic of YouTube
Two to the one to the two to the three
I like good p*ssy and I like good trees
Smoke so much w*ed you wouldn't believe
And I get more a$$ than a toilet seat
Three to the one to the one to the three... (fade out)
