Good content from Dan Brown. Regardless of my personal opinion of him, his opinions, and the choices he's made over the course of his years on Youtube (including Dan 3.0, a failed attempt to have his audience directly dictate his life), Brown has always had an articulate and interesting point of view on whatever subject he chooses to broach. When he speaks about those damaging results, he's speaking from personal experience.
Most of you may not care in the slightest about the allegations going on in the youtube community right now, but they interestingly mirror some of the events occurring in the much more legitimate limelight right now.. It is their mirroring of these events which leads me to share this here.
Youtube is, in many ways - and vlogging especially - a microcosm of our society. While anyone with a video camera can ostensibly be a vlogger, only those with something interesting to say, or an engaging way of saying it, will become popular and widely viewed. This leads to a few problems we see evident in traditional media as well -
1.) extreme views, loudly stated, become viewed in some way as popular.
2.) silver-tongued snake oil salesmen can convince willing masses of just about anything.
3.) the vast swath of the middle opinion has little to no voice.
At least we have wranglers for the Glenn Becks and the Bill Mahers of the world. These popular youtubers gain a power over people which they don't fully comprehend, and don't understand how to control. This leads to the misuse of that power, knowingly or unknowingly. Alex Day's (spurious, imo) claims that he didn't know that he was taking advantage of those he had sex with are similar to the claims made by Jian Ghomeshi that he believed that he was engaging in consentual relations. These people may have said yes at the time, but only because, due to the power of the accused, they felt that they could not say no.
Thoughts, Hubski?
This is my second attempt. My first was so full of bile and vitriol that my screen started to stink.
I know these people. I work with them. And they're not important. They're not a microcosm of anything. They're a desperate cry for attention by a bunch of trust fund kids.
I can tell you want this to be relevant and worthy of comment. It's not. I'm sorry. Youtubers only matter to other Youtubers and they only matter as much as their ability to buy or trade followers. The Glenn Becks and BIll Mahers of the world have to compete in a marketplace - Youtubers can buy influence and their best method towards reach is to spam, spam, spam their way to the top.
I can also say - as a Streamy nominee - that quality absolutely doesn't fucking matter one little bit in the land of Youtube. So whatever parallels you're trying to make to the real world, thanks for trying, but it's kind of like trying to call Buzzfeed a legitimate news source.