Counterpoint: there's a lot of content creators who stick religiously to a weekly/monthly posting schedule, and within a few years the flaws of that dedication become apparent. You start seeing them repeat themselves, make long videos about topics that could have been covered in 20 minutes, have long, bad comedy bits cuz they have nothing to say. Turns out making entertaining content on a regular schedule is hard enough when you have a studio TV budget, much less when you're working solo. Especially channels focused on a specific topic, often within a year they've realized they've said everything there is to say about it. WTYP has started getting kinda repetitive cuz Roz has basically covered almost every type of engineering problem and the explanation as to why it happened is always about the same.
chapotraphouse
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip
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.
Idk why you took this as a defense of Contra, she sucks.
I haven't watched Three Arrows in a while, but while a Lib, he does seem to have some level of professionalism and production value, why his content has slowed I don't know but it maybe that he feels there's less topics he has anything original to say on.
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.
Interesting, if we continue with this, why would the amount of time for each video increase as the regularity of the posting goes on? Is it since there's less time to create something 'short and sweet'?
I guess I figure that the scope of each video would scale appropriately to the resources at one's disposal. I also think that long videos would take a lot more effort but that might be because talking for such a long period to me would be exhausting. Yeah, and I don't think I could reasonably keep on topic as well.
I wonder what you or others might have to think?
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.
Never trust a content creator that isn't active in an org.
That is true, though.
GetChan FTW
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
The worst enemy that the worker has
those are not the soldiers;
nor is it the city council,
or the mine owners, or the clergy.
His worst enemy stands, sly and small,
in his own ranks, in his own ranks.
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
More costumes than substance, and the remaining substance tends to be "Tabby is so ridiculous, amirite?" 
Does Contra put out lots of exclusive Patreon content or something? Or is she just riding on passive income and doing basically nothing?
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.
Oh no, it's a parasocial relationship; her fans think they're her friends. ☹️
I think she also does livestreams where she plays video games or something (Shaun does this too)
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.
On the one hand yeah but on the other I would also go into psuedo-retirement if I had the opportunity so I can't hate too much. I wish there was a clearer picture of where the patreon money is coming from though, because I feel like there's probably a "whale" economy on that site where a relatively small number of people are subscribed to tons of creators or that a lot of money gets "locked in" because people sign up and forget about it.
Semi related but this pattern predates Patreon by a bit. Guys like The Spoony One were getting enough donos and ad revenue to basically stop producing content a decade or more ago.
The laziness and coasting on a sizable, stable income would totally be fine if they had better takes.
video essays and their consequences
Death to America
That's staggering for someone who is getting over 60k a year, at the most conservative estimate.
Two videos per year with now a team of multiple people means it is absolutely acceptable salary for the imperial core.
I'm in fredrik knudsens patreon and he hasn't uploaded in two years, I really don't mind a content creator producing less, it almost always means what they produce will be of better quality
besides, it's a voluntary thing, it's really not their fault people like them so much they donate to them, it's not like they're demanding it or holding the content hostage
I mean it’s pretty innocuous content creation and should be viewed as nothing other than entertainment like a Netflix or Hulu 
Contrapoints releases most of her videos on Patreon iirc along with streams on Youtube every month
I think Three Arrows does an unremarkable podcast about Weimar germany now, I remember him talking about the 1919 revolution and completely missing how much of a betrayal the SPDs actions were to the trajectory that world socialism had been taking, "their voters didn't want revolution" is what he said