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PewDiePie’s Battle for the Soul of the Internet

102 points by tim_sw 8y ago

maa5444 8y ago
the fact he is the most followed person on YouTube ..... tell us a lot who a mass stermination was planned by who runs this planet
tomohawk 8y ago
Pretty good read. Liked this quote: > Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook this way: “We trumpeted [our platform] like it was some hot-shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates…And Gates said something along the lines of, ‘That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a ‘platform.’ A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’” The brilliant Microsoft founder knew that his own Windows operating system was a true platform because, as Microsoft openly bragged, the company itself captured only a minority of the value created through the Windows ecosystem. Facebook, YouTube and Google are in a completely different category—because the vast majority of the wealth they generate is controlled by the social-media oligopolies themselves. They aren’t platforms so much as rent-seeking agents that oversee a set of critical economic protocols.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  I don't know about the Google of today but the Google of say 2003 clearly fit that definition. It was making it possible for 1000s of mom and pop shops to reach a much larger audience. I remember specifically a story about a small company that made custom cowboy boots that was doing much better now that it could could buy a few keywords and target people looking for those kinds of boots so that seems to fit. Youtube certainly seems like a platform for others to make money, the top example being PewDiePie himself making 7 million year 2 or 3 years ago from just youtube ad share. No idea how much more he made from product placements or endorsements. There's clearly some amount being made by groups like Vox, Kurzgesagt, Corridor, and similar channels who . Would those channels be able to survive if they had to pay to stream their own video?
smacktoward 8y ago
> The story centres entirely on Kjellberg accidentally throwing a fringe site into a laundry list of other outlets he was seeking to signal-boost. Poor Pewd! It's sad how these accidents keep happening to him, over and over again. Just bad luck, I guess.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Classic cherry-picking logic. If, on the contrary, let's cherry picking the good things said by Pewd, then anyone can come at the opposite statement. I am really disturbed by this line of thinking, which bases conclusions on top of unfounded claims in the first place.
  - hnmonkey 8y ago
    If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones. It doesn't take many negative things sometimes (often just 1) to be enough to outrage people. No one is going to ignore the negative things because he also happened to say good things (subjectively of course). You seem to be saying that they're cherry picking the negative things which means they can't be 'unfounded claims' like you say later.
    - jamesrcole 8y ago
      > If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones No it doesn't. Why do you think it means the negatives must outweigh the positives?
      - hnmonkey 8y ago
        Because this isn't a zero-sum game. If you say 9,999 good things on the internet and 1 offensive thing people aren't going to say 'oh... but he said 9,999 good ones so we should ignore the one that we find offensive'.
        8y ago
Reedx 8y ago
This trend of outrage journalism is disturbing. Where the goal seems to be about finding the worst possible interpretation for clicks and prestige points. The headline is all that seems to matter, with few digging into the actual context. Which both fuels more uninformed outrage and erodes trust in journalism overall. It seems like a new form of witch hunting?
- krainboltgreene 8y ago
  Sounds like you've never read about "witch hunting". These journalists are just taking what he's done, putting it into context, and writing about it. The man has suffered nothing this entire time. He makes millions.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    > putting it into context It seems like it's quite the opposite most of the time, which is the reason for the backlash against the articles.
    - krainboltgreene 8y ago
      Then I suggest you read up on the situation.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        I'm fully aware. Clearly people will believe what they want to believe so I'll stay out of that, but I do think there is a major issue with what "context" is and how it's presented.
  - wyoh 8y ago
    Outside of any context you mean. I don't see what making millions has to do with it.
    - sascha_sl 8y ago
pfschell 8y ago
20 years ago when the internet was just hitting its stride, it would be unthinkable for any individual or organization to systematically attack anyone on the internet for the content they created. The fact that so many have devolved into a religious fervor over silencing any views they don't like is anathema to the fundamental purpose of the internet itself. Edit: and entirely predictably, I am being attacked for saying this. HN is part of the problem.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hnmonkey 8y ago
  The internet is a place where usually people can state their views openly. That is happening. However, what's also happening is people find his views and comments disgusting and they're commenting on it. Totally within their rights to do. And it's not as unthinkable as you say at all that an individual or organization would attack others for what content they create. Since there has been an internet there's been people who attacked others for their content. I'm not sure what internet you saw 20 years ago but it wasn't the same I saw.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    rotten.com? stileproject? goatse.cx? were there even other sites 20 years ago? The Smoking Gun? When did Cryptome/Cartome start? I don't know, but I know users on slashdot weren't pearl-clutching prudes, for example. Sure people "commented on" things they didn't like, on their own websites. Not on platforms from which they wanted to kick others, certainly not as a habitual normal thing a sane person would consider. Yes, "such people always existed", so in that sense it was "thinkable". But it wasn't done as a matter of course, as a way to win debates.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  > it would be unthinkable for any individual or organization to systematically attack anyone on the internet for the content they created. It's unthinkable that you would criticize Vox for content that they have created. 20 years ago this wouldn't have happened!
spectre256 8y ago
A key part of the article seems to be that PewDiePie's channel is largely satire, which is inherently under attack and worth protecting. Maybe I am getting old, but I find satire a lot less valuable than I once did. The article mentions South Park too. I once loved the show, and still remember many moments in a strangely fond way. But the problem of Poe's law and the like means satire is sometimes taken seriously, and the cumulative effects of that have serious and real repercussions. The creators of South Park, for example, recently "apologized" to Al Gore[1], who they ridiculed mercilessly. Many people believe that ridicule seriously hurt the climate change movement. I can't imagine what a real world solution would look like, but I would gladly live in a world where those episodes disappeared and we were in a little better spot regarding climate change. We probably don't yet know what the lasting legacy of PewDiePie will be, but personally I'm doubting the positive aspects of it will outweigh the effects of many of his viewers taking some of his satire seriously. [1] https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al-gore-and-admits-it-was-wrong-about-global-warming https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al...
- hnmonkey 8y ago
  If his channel falls into a satire category then the category has massively expanded these days. Outrage porn is not satire and is just going for shock value. It's not satirizing anything, which is often a commentary on how absurd something is and not just saying something disgusting to get views.
  - jamesrcole 8y ago
    I've seen a number of his videos and none of those could be classified as outrage porn. They were nothing like that at all.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    I don't follow him much, but his content (currently, he pivoted from a few years ago) certainly has satirical elements.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    I guess one could argue that outrage porn is a satire of outrage culture
Chazprime 8y ago
“PewDiePie’s ties to white supremacy spell serious trouble for the future of YouTube” Titles like the above are likely the reason that news outlets like Vox and Vice have fallen on hard times. It’s a shame really - both outlets have done some seriously groundbreaking work, but this...this is just cheap outrage-bait for clicks.
- panic 8y ago
  Aren't clickbait titles one of the things keeping these outlets afloat?
- fareesh 8y ago
  As an outsider it feels like young people in America are getting their values from some kind of cult of political correctness. It seems to be doing the same thing that the religious right used to do at one point in time. The old censorious approach to a new set of blasphemous topics has become the norm. What seems obviously broken is the fact that ideals like free speech, free association, due process, etc. have taken a backseat to some new rules like inclusivity, hyper sensitivity and hyper empathy. That is dangerous for society. It has happened before in so many theocracies. A very vocal group seems to have seized the reins of all mainstream media and technology companies in areas like "trust and safety", which always seem to morph into propaganda outfits. By displacing to a large extent judeo Christian values, for all their faults, perhaps in education and elsewhere, it looks like something far more broken, dangerous and sinister has filled the void left by it. As a result the new crop of young talent seems to be attracted to these new "woke" companies like vice and vox who are pandering to their misguided ideas of the world.
  - hnmonkey 8y ago
    What 'far more broken, dangerous, and sinister' things have filled the void left by Judeo-Christian values? There's a long history of Judeo-Christian values being pretty broken, dangerous, and sinister themselves. The Spanish Inquisition is just 1 of many examples.
    - 8y ago
unixhero 8y ago
Let's try a Trump quote "There is good people on both sides" rofl
- drak0n1c 8y ago
  I'll play devil's advocate. Part of the Charlottesville pro-statue crowd were "heritage not hate" types who grew up with those town statues as part of their local history and had no personal racial animus. While I think they're misguided, I think they can still be "good people". They heard of the rally amidst the trend of statues getting taken down, and showed up without knowing of the organizer or who else would show up. Before you dismiss this out of reflex - most Women's March attendees had no idea that some organizers of the march were connected to anti-Semitism and a speaker was convicted for torturing a gay man to death (Donna Hylton). Of course, this part of the crowd was not sensational and was not covered so perceptions were shaped accordingly. The part that was repeatedly covered was the neo-Nazi vans showing up later in the day (the original attendees started leaving when this happened), and the subsequent brawls and vehicle terrorism. Much like how there were well-intentioned statue protesters and violent antifa marxists, there were also well-intentioned statue advocates and violent neo-nazis. In light of that the statement of "good people on both sides" is not malicious or technically wrong, though it was unnecessary and tone-deaf.
  - will4274 8y ago
    It's unfortunate that you are downvoted without any responses. I read this article about the Women's March just today: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is-the-womens-march-melting-down https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is... . Certainly many of the people I know (having grown up in a fairly Jewish community) attended the Women's March without understanding the views of their leadership.
  - hyperpape 8y ago
    There was live footage of what looked like a thousand people marching with torches the night before, chanting “you will not replace us”, which is part of the racist “white genocide” theory. I live in North Carolina with a lot of folks who have confederate flag clothes or complain about how bad it is that confederate statues come down. I don’t know that any of them expressed sympathy for the Charlottesville groups. Your general point about movements being messy things is right. I’m just not so sure it applies here.
Tehnix 8y ago
To be honest, the disgusting hit pieces/slander from WSJ, Vox, The Verge, etc that has been on PewDiePie, has made me loose almost all faith in MSM outlets and their credibility. If you let your journalists write things that are so outright wrong, and so extremely trying to twist the words of someone to manipulate your readers, then why on earth should I trust any other story from you. And I doubt in any way I’m alone in this—proabably the far majority of PewDiePie’s subscribers don’t take media outlets serious anymore. The age of journalism has long been dead. Click-bait killed in, and now they just putting nails in their own coffin.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  > then why on earth should I trust any other story from you. Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is rapidly disappearing as people has access to broader information channels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- Reedx 8y ago
  > The age of journalism has long been dead. Click-bait killed in, and now they just putting nails in their own coffin. Sam Harris and Matt Taibbi had a good discussion about this. How news has gone from being a loss leader to competing with clickbait. https://samharris.org/podcasts/140-burning-fourth-estate/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/140-burning-fourth-estate/
- wp381640 8y ago
  I knew little about this topic until I just happen to catch Pewdiepie on a podcast. He spoke at length about the recent Swedish elections, how his mother cried when the Swedish Democrats (the new right-wing) party won, how he thinks young people can be more racist than old people today, went on to defend immigrants, the old Swedish values of being an open society etc. He sounded like the complete opposite of what the media in these stories are portraying him to be
  - qnsi 8y ago
    Do you happen to know the name of podcast? Was it in English or in Swedish?
drak0n1c 8y ago
I'm in my late twenties, and it's interesting to see "tech" and "culture" journalists around my age get more and more out of touch with internet culture. At first I thought it was deliberate misinterpretation of satire and Monty Python shock-jock comedy for the purposes of clicks and politics. Now I'm not so sure - much like how early 4chan's self-deprecating and self-aware irreverence devolved in a swell of uncreative people taking the memes (and themselves) way too seriously, the same seems to be occurring with the media. Maybe the media is on to something when they say memes, jokes, and satire are dangerous because too many people take the performance literally and become neo-Nazis? But I don't see this phenomenon as only existing inside that sphere - so many people, even journalists who should know better, are content with bits of second-hand information and out-of-context sound bites when making up their mind about something or someone. Maybe we're getting too comfortable with the internet. It was once a curio outside of our brain, but as it becomes a part of who we are we increasingly give it authenticity.
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  A wise anon said as far back as 2007, on 4chan's politics board, paraphrased: A community that consistently pretends to be something will eventually attract and finally be replaced by exactly the people they meant to pose as. In this case, nazis. Even now you can't really tell how serious people on there are.
  - burgerboy 8y ago
    Nazi's lol you are obviously out of touch
will4274 8y ago
It's interesting to compare the level of forgiveness / empathy from news organizations like Vox and Vice depending on the subject they are covering. 1. Youtube star who links a white supremacist channel and then immediately disavows it - still a racist. 2. Democratic presidential candidate (Obama) meets with and has photos taken with avowed racist and anti-Semite (Farrakhan) and then disavows it a few years later - no problems here. Websites with discussion (like hacker news) have simple rules like "assume good faith." If somebody says they don't believe something, participants are expected to accept that, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Yet, "respected news organizations" like Vox and Vice only presume good faith for people who agree with them.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  And yet, when 3. our current president said there were "fine people on both sides" it's still racist, because it is a pattern of behavior. It's not a single incident. Obama disavowed Wright and Farrakhan in a speech that was praised by nearly everyone, including Mike Huckabee and John McCain, and was president for 8 years without winking at Nazis, white supremacists, or anti-semites like Farrakhan.
  - anon12345690 8y ago
    do you realize that people use bad words all the time in real life? saying a few bad words when you record yourself hours every day is not a big deal and almost everyone can look past it because other than some words he hasnt actually done anything meanwhile you should probably pay attention to actual fascists out there in the world like in china and russia
    - akhilcacharya 8y ago
      Because most people don’t use the nslur against people even in “heated gaming moments”
      - username90 8y ago
hyperpape 8y ago
Search this article for the racial slur that PewDePie yelled out during a livestream, and you won’t find it. The essence of the anti-censorship position, non-governmental or otherwise, is acknowledging when someone says something that you object to, and nonetheless supporting their right to say it. Sweeping it under the rug is just cowardice. (I’m being generous in even linking this to censorship of any form. PewDePie is still on YouTube (as he should be allowed to be!), he just wasn’t featured in a highlight reel).
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  > Sweeping it under the rug is just cowardice 100% correct. Too often though, this is the default defense-non-defense for all sorts of awful behavior. However, it's a great tactic to try to switch the conversation from a "should" to a "can".
- username90 8y ago
  To someone not growing up in America it isn't clear that you can't say the n-word. We see people say it all the time in tv shows so we just copy that. Therefore it makes perfect sense that Europeans uses the n-word without being racist. Once they are told to stop they usually do though.
jl2718 8y ago
I’d like to re-center this on the author’s central diagnosis. Advertising is the problem. Bad protocol design is the cause. Now advertising giants control the protocols. What are we going to do about it?
kgunnr 8y ago
Do your part in the 9 year old army!
luord 8y ago
While I won't subscribe to PewDiePie because I'm just not interested in that kind of content... I disagree with very, very little of this piece. Sad state of affairs.
repolfx 8y ago
All the comments here are about journalism or politics so I'll start a thread about technology instead. The article says this: this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web ... Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube But this is a major misunderstanding of the problem, which is not due to the web's design but rather the basic incentive issues around the creation of decentralised, public infrastructure. Because of course there is such a public protocol that allows video to be shared as easily as hypertext. It's called the web. How does this author think YouTube works, exactly? Anyone can transcode a video, upload it to their personal web server and use the <video> tag. The codecs, the transports, the viewer software, it's all free and public. So why don't PewDiePie and others like them do that? Why do they all flock to YouTube and then create massive dramas over YouTube's policies? And by the way, I ask these rhetorical questions as someone who is no fan of Google's recent turn towards blocking and censorship of conservative views. Well the questions are rhetorical because the answers are obvious. They stick with YouTube and don't even go elsewhere if they get silenced because the value YouTube is providing them is staggeringly huge. YouTube isn't merely a way to publish video. It's a huge, no questions asked bandwidth and CPU subsidy. It's the technology to instantly handle serving to planet-scale populations. It's commenting and voting that's defending against spamming and other forms of DoS. It's discovery and sharing. It's editing tools and analytics and most of all it's advertising - monetisation is what we lack public infrastructure for, not video serving. And why do we lack public protocols for all these things? Because creating YouTube is a hell of a lot of work for many people and they want to get paid for their skills. Which inherently means they need to own the result of their work, and ownership implies control. Private property rights, that's capitalism and incentives 101. I've worked on decentralisation related software for a long time and still do, because there are certain areas where it can really help. But you can't inherently point the finger at existing technologies and say "if only they were better, everything would be decentralised". No, it doesn't work like that. It's a failed analysis of the problem. Create decentralised tech like the <video> tag or git, and a YouTube and GitHub will arise around it and re-centralise it all by providing value the public protocol does not. Society wants centralisation because most of the time, the abuses of power it allows are collectively considered low cost relative to the benefits of the extra features and competence the centralisation allows. This doesn't mean it's all useless. Git being decentralised is helpful even though everyone has centralised around GitHub: if you do want to move your code off of GitHub, you are just a "git push" away from having all your history and branches painlessly transferred to GitLab or your own server. Sure, that won't help your issues or pull requests, but that doesn't take away from the fact that source code is now properly decentralised and that's still better than before. So we should continue to develop decentralised technology, whilst understanding that it won't result in everyone using purely decentralised systems.

102 points by tim_sw 8y ago

the fact he is the most followed person on YouTube ..... tell us a lot who a mass stermination was planned by who runs this planet

tomohawk 8y ago

Pretty good read. Liked this quote: > Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook this way: “We trumpeted [our platform] like it was some hot-shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates…And Gates said something along the lines of, ‘That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a ‘platform.’ A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’” The brilliant Microsoft founder knew that his own Windows operating system was a true platform because, as Microsoft openly bragged, the company itself captured only a minority of the value created through the Windows ecosystem. Facebook, YouTube and Google are in a completely different category—because the vast majority of the wealth they generate is controlled by the social-media oligopolies themselves. They aren’t platforms so much as rent-seeking agents that oversee a set of critical economic protocols.

tokyodude 8y ago
I don't know about the Google of today but the Google of say 2003 clearly fit that definition. It was making it possible for 1000s of mom and pop shops to reach a much larger audience. I remember specifically a story about a small company that made custom cowboy boots that was doing much better now that it could could buy a few keywords and target people looking for those kinds of boots so that seems to fit. Youtube certainly seems like a platform for others to make money, the top example being PewDiePie himself making 7 million year 2 or 3 years ago from just youtube ad share. No idea how much more he made from product placements or endorsements. There's clearly some amount being made by groups like Vox, Kurzgesagt, Corridor, and similar channels who . Would those channels be able to survive if they had to pay to stream their own video?

smacktoward 8y ago

> The story centres entirely on Kjellberg accidentally throwing a fringe site into a laundry list of other outlets he was seeking to signal-boost. Poor Pewd! It's sad how these accidents keep happening to him, over and over again. Just bad luck, I guess.

justicezyx 8y ago
Classic cherry-picking logic. If, on the contrary, let's cherry picking the good things said by Pewd, then anyone can come at the opposite statement. I am really disturbed by this line of thinking, which bases conclusions on top of unfounded claims in the first place.
- hnmonkey 8y ago
  If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones. It doesn't take many negative things sometimes (often just 1) to be enough to outrage people. No one is going to ignore the negative things because he also happened to say good things (subjectively of course). You seem to be saying that they're cherry picking the negative things which means they can't be 'unfounded claims' like you say later.
  - jamesrcole 8y ago
    > If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones No it doesn't. Why do you think it means the negatives must outweigh the positives?
    - hnmonkey 8y ago
      Because this isn't a zero-sum game. If you say 9,999 good things on the internet and 1 offensive thing people aren't going to say 'oh... but he said 9,999 good ones so we should ignore the one that we find offensive'.
      - 8y ago

Reedx 8y ago

This trend of outrage journalism is disturbing. Where the goal seems to be about finding the worst possible interpretation for clicks and prestige points. The headline is all that seems to matter, with few digging into the actual context. Which both fuels more uninformed outrage and erodes trust in journalism overall. It seems like a new form of witch hunting?

krainboltgreene 8y ago
Sounds like you've never read about "witch hunting". These journalists are just taking what he's done, putting it into context, and writing about it. The man has suffered nothing this entire time. He makes millions.
- manigandham 8y ago
  > putting it into context It seems like it's quite the opposite most of the time, which is the reason for the backlash against the articles.
  - krainboltgreene 8y ago
    Then I suggest you read up on the situation.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      I'm fully aware. Clearly people will believe what they want to believe so I'll stay out of that, but I do think there is a major issue with what "context" is and how it's presented.
- wyoh 8y ago
  Outside of any context you mean. I don't see what making millions has to do with it.
  - sascha_sl 8y ago

pfschell 8y ago

20 years ago when the internet was just hitting its stride, it would be unthinkable for any individual or organization to systematically attack anyone on the internet for the content they created. The fact that so many have devolved into a religious fervor over silencing any views they don't like is anathema to the fundamental purpose of the internet itself. Edit: and entirely predictably, I am being attacked for saying this. HN is part of the problem.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hnmonkey 8y ago
The internet is a place where usually people can state their views openly. That is happening. However, what's also happening is people find his views and comments disgusting and they're commenting on it. Totally within their rights to do. And it's not as unthinkable as you say at all that an individual or organization would attack others for what content they create. Since there has been an internet there's been people who attacked others for their content. I'm not sure what internet you saw 20 years ago but it wasn't the same I saw.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  rotten.com? stileproject? goatse.cx? were there even other sites 20 years ago? The Smoking Gun? When did Cryptome/Cartome start? I don't know, but I know users on slashdot weren't pearl-clutching prudes, for example. Sure people "commented on" things they didn't like, on their own websites. Not on platforms from which they wanted to kick others, certainly not as a habitual normal thing a sane person would consider. Yes, "such people always existed", so in that sense it was "thinkable". But it wasn't done as a matter of course, as a way to win debates.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
> it would be unthinkable for any individual or organization to systematically attack anyone on the internet for the content they created. It's unthinkable that you would criticize Vox for content that they have created. 20 years ago this wouldn't have happened!

spectre256 8y ago

A key part of the article seems to be that PewDiePie's channel is largely satire, which is inherently under attack and worth protecting. Maybe I am getting old, but I find satire a lot less valuable than I once did. The article mentions South Park too. I once loved the show, and still remember many moments in a strangely fond way. But the problem of Poe's law and the like means satire is sometimes taken seriously, and the cumulative effects of that have serious and real repercussions. The creators of South Park, for example, recently "apologized" to Al Gore[1], who they ridiculed mercilessly. Many people believe that ridicule seriously hurt the climate change movement. I can't imagine what a real world solution would look like, but I would gladly live in a world where those episodes disappeared and we were in a little better spot regarding climate change. We probably don't yet know what the lasting legacy of PewDiePie will be, but personally I'm doubting the positive aspects of it will outweigh the effects of many of his viewers taking some of his satire seriously. [1] https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al-gore-and-admits-it-was-wrong-about-global-warming https://www.salon.com/2018/11/08/south-park-apologizes-to-al...

hnmonkey 8y ago
If his channel falls into a satire category then the category has massively expanded these days. Outrage porn is not satire and is just going for shock value. It's not satirizing anything, which is often a commentary on how absurd something is and not just saying something disgusting to get views.
- jamesrcole 8y ago
  I've seen a number of his videos and none of those could be classified as outrage porn. They were nothing like that at all.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  I don't follow him much, but his content (currently, he pivoted from a few years ago) certainly has satirical elements.
- zimablue 8y ago
  I guess one could argue that outrage porn is a satire of outrage culture

Chazprime 8y ago

“PewDiePie’s ties to white supremacy spell serious trouble for the future of YouTube” Titles like the above are likely the reason that news outlets like Vox and Vice have fallen on hard times. It’s a shame really - both outlets have done some seriously groundbreaking work, but this...this is just cheap outrage-bait for clicks.

panic 8y ago
Aren't clickbait titles one of the things keeping these outlets afloat?
fareesh 8y ago
As an outsider it feels like young people in America are getting their values from some kind of cult of political correctness. It seems to be doing the same thing that the religious right used to do at one point in time. The old censorious approach to a new set of blasphemous topics has become the norm. What seems obviously broken is the fact that ideals like free speech, free association, due process, etc. have taken a backseat to some new rules like inclusivity, hyper sensitivity and hyper empathy. That is dangerous for society. It has happened before in so many theocracies. A very vocal group seems to have seized the reins of all mainstream media and technology companies in areas like "trust and safety", which always seem to morph into propaganda outfits. By displacing to a large extent judeo Christian values, for all their faults, perhaps in education and elsewhere, it looks like something far more broken, dangerous and sinister has filled the void left by it. As a result the new crop of young talent seems to be attracted to these new "woke" companies like vice and vox who are pandering to their misguided ideas of the world.
- hnmonkey 8y ago
  What 'far more broken, dangerous, and sinister' things have filled the void left by Judeo-Christian values? There's a long history of Judeo-Christian values being pretty broken, dangerous, and sinister themselves. The Spanish Inquisition is just 1 of many examples.
  - 8y ago

unixhero 8y ago

Let's try a Trump quote "There is good people on both sides" rofl

drak0n1c 8y ago
I'll play devil's advocate. Part of the Charlottesville pro-statue crowd were "heritage not hate" types who grew up with those town statues as part of their local history and had no personal racial animus. While I think they're misguided, I think they can still be "good people". They heard of the rally amidst the trend of statues getting taken down, and showed up without knowing of the organizer or who else would show up. Before you dismiss this out of reflex - most Women's March attendees had no idea that some organizers of the march were connected to anti-Semitism and a speaker was convicted for torturing a gay man to death (Donna Hylton). Of course, this part of the crowd was not sensational and was not covered so perceptions were shaped accordingly. The part that was repeatedly covered was the neo-Nazi vans showing up later in the day (the original attendees started leaving when this happened), and the subsequent brawls and vehicle terrorism. Much like how there were well-intentioned statue protesters and violent antifa marxists, there were also well-intentioned statue advocates and violent neo-nazis. In light of that the statement of "good people on both sides" is not malicious or technically wrong, though it was unnecessary and tone-deaf.
- will4274 8y ago
  It's unfortunate that you are downvoted without any responses. I read this article about the Women's March just today: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is-the-womens-march-melting-down https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is... . Certainly many of the people I know (having grown up in a fairly Jewish community) attended the Women's March without understanding the views of their leadership.
- hyperpape 8y ago
  There was live footage of what looked like a thousand people marching with torches the night before, chanting “you will not replace us”, which is part of the racist “white genocide” theory. I live in North Carolina with a lot of folks who have confederate flag clothes or complain about how bad it is that confederate statues come down. I don’t know that any of them expressed sympathy for the Charlottesville groups. Your general point about movements being messy things is right. I’m just not so sure it applies here.

Tehnix 8y ago

To be honest, the disgusting hit pieces/slander from WSJ, Vox, The Verge, etc that has been on PewDiePie, has made me loose almost all faith in MSM outlets and their credibility. If you let your journalists write things that are so outright wrong, and so extremely trying to twist the words of someone to manipulate your readers, then why on earth should I trust any other story from you. And I doubt in any way I’m alone in this—proabably the far majority of PewDiePie’s subscribers don’t take media outlets serious anymore. The age of journalism has long been dead. Click-bait killed in, and now they just putting nails in their own coffin.

JorgeGT 8y ago
> then why on earth should I trust any other story from you. Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is rapidly disappearing as people has access to broader information channels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Reedx 8y ago
> The age of journalism has long been dead. Click-bait killed in, and now they just putting nails in their own coffin. Sam Harris and Matt Taibbi had a good discussion about this. How news has gone from being a loss leader to competing with clickbait. https://samharris.org/podcasts/140-burning-fourth-estate/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/140-burning-fourth-estate/
wp381640 8y ago
I knew little about this topic until I just happen to catch Pewdiepie on a podcast. He spoke at length about the recent Swedish elections, how his mother cried when the Swedish Democrats (the new right-wing) party won, how he thinks young people can be more racist than old people today, went on to defend immigrants, the old Swedish values of being an open society etc. He sounded like the complete opposite of what the media in these stories are portraying him to be
- qnsi 8y ago
  Do you happen to know the name of podcast? Was it in English or in Swedish?

drak0n1c 8y ago

I'm in my late twenties, and it's interesting to see "tech" and "culture" journalists around my age get more and more out of touch with internet culture. At first I thought it was deliberate misinterpretation of satire and Monty Python shock-jock comedy for the purposes of clicks and politics. Now I'm not so sure - much like how early 4chan's self-deprecating and self-aware irreverence devolved in a swell of uncreative people taking the memes (and themselves) way too seriously, the same seems to be occurring with the media. Maybe the media is on to something when they say memes, jokes, and satire are dangerous because too many people take the performance literally and become neo-Nazis? But I don't see this phenomenon as only existing inside that sphere - so many people, even journalists who should know better, are content with bits of second-hand information and out-of-context sound bites when making up their mind about something or someone. Maybe we're getting too comfortable with the internet. It was once a curio outside of our brain, but as it becomes a part of who we are we increasingly give it authenticity.

sascha_sl 8y ago
A wise anon said as far back as 2007, on 4chan's politics board, paraphrased: A community that consistently pretends to be something will eventually attract and finally be replaced by exactly the people they meant to pose as. In this case, nazis. Even now you can't really tell how serious people on there are.
- burgerboy 8y ago
  Nazi's lol you are obviously out of touch

will4274 8y ago

It's interesting to compare the level of forgiveness / empathy from news organizations like Vox and Vice depending on the subject they are covering. 1. Youtube star who links a white supremacist channel and then immediately disavows it - still a racist. 2. Democratic presidential candidate (Obama) meets with and has photos taken with avowed racist and anti-Semite (Farrakhan) and then disavows it a few years later - no problems here. Websites with discussion (like hacker news) have simple rules like "assume good faith." If somebody says they don't believe something, participants are expected to accept that, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Yet, "respected news organizations" like Vox and Vice only presume good faith for people who agree with them.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
And yet, when 3. our current president said there were "fine people on both sides" it's still racist, because it is a pattern of behavior. It's not a single incident. Obama disavowed Wright and Farrakhan in a speech that was praised by nearly everyone, including Mike Huckabee and John McCain, and was president for 8 years without winking at Nazis, white supremacists, or anti-semites like Farrakhan.
- anon12345690 8y ago
  do you realize that people use bad words all the time in real life? saying a few bad words when you record yourself hours every day is not a big deal and almost everyone can look past it because other than some words he hasnt actually done anything meanwhile you should probably pay attention to actual fascists out there in the world like in china and russia
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    Because most people don’t use the nslur against people even in “heated gaming moments”
    - username90 8y ago

hyperpape 8y ago

Search this article for the racial slur that PewDePie yelled out during a livestream, and you won’t find it. The essence of the anti-censorship position, non-governmental or otherwise, is acknowledging when someone says something that you object to, and nonetheless supporting their right to say it. Sweeping it under the rug is just cowardice. (I’m being generous in even linking this to censorship of any form. PewDePie is still on YouTube (as he should be allowed to be!), he just wasn’t featured in a highlight reel).

akhilcacharya 8y ago
> Sweeping it under the rug is just cowardice 100% correct. Too often though, this is the default defense-non-defense for all sorts of awful behavior. However, it's a great tactic to try to switch the conversation from a "should" to a "can".
username90 8y ago
To someone not growing up in America it isn't clear that you can't say the n-word. We see people say it all the time in tv shows so we just copy that. Therefore it makes perfect sense that Europeans uses the n-word without being racist. Once they are told to stop they usually do though.

jl2718 8y ago

I’d like to re-center this on the author’s central diagnosis. Advertising is the problem. Bad protocol design is the cause. Now advertising giants control the protocols. What are we going to do about it?

kgunnr 8y ago

Do your part in the 9 year old army!

luord 8y ago

While I won't subscribe to PewDiePie because I'm just not interested in that kind of content... I disagree with very, very little of this piece. Sad state of affairs.

repolfx 8y ago

All the comments here are about journalism or politics so I'll start a thread about technology instead. The article says this: this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web ... Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube But this is a major misunderstanding of the problem, which is not due to the web's design but rather the basic incentive issues around the creation of decentralised, public infrastructure. Because of course there is such a public protocol that allows video to be shared as easily as hypertext. It's called the web. How does this author think YouTube works, exactly? Anyone can transcode a video, upload it to their personal web server and use the <video> tag. The codecs, the transports, the viewer software, it's all free and public. So why don't PewDiePie and others like them do that? Why do they all flock to YouTube and then create massive dramas over YouTube's policies? And by the way, I ask these rhetorical questions as someone who is no fan of Google's recent turn towards blocking and censorship of conservative views. Well the questions are rhetorical because the answers are obvious. They stick with YouTube and don't even go elsewhere if they get silenced because the value YouTube is providing them is staggeringly huge. YouTube isn't merely a way to publish video. It's a huge, no questions asked bandwidth and CPU subsidy. It's the technology to instantly handle serving to planet-scale populations. It's commenting and voting that's defending against spamming and other forms of DoS. It's discovery and sharing. It's editing tools and analytics and most of all it's advertising - monetisation is what we lack public infrastructure for, not video serving. And why do we lack public protocols for all these things? Because creating YouTube is a hell of a lot of work for many people and they want to get paid for their skills. Which inherently means they need to own the result of their work, and ownership implies control. Private property rights, that's capitalism and incentives 101. I've worked on decentralisation related software for a long time and still do, because there are certain areas where it can really help. But you can't inherently point the finger at existing technologies and say "if only they were better, everything would be decentralised". No, it doesn't work like that. It's a failed analysis of the problem. Create decentralised tech like the <video> tag or git, and a YouTube and GitHub will arise around it and re-centralise it all by providing value the public protocol does not. Society wants centralisation because most of the time, the abuses of power it allows are collectively considered low cost relative to the benefits of the extra features and competence the centralisation allows. This doesn't mean it's all useless. Git being decentralised is helpful even though everyone has centralised around GitHub: if you do want to move your code off of GitHub, you are just a "git push" away from having all your history and branches painlessly transferred to GitLab or your own server. Sure, that won't help your issues or pull requests, but that doesn't take away from the fact that source code is now properly decentralised and that's still better than before. So we should continue to develop decentralised technology, whilst understanding that it won't result in everyone using purely decentralised systems.