Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
Sabine Hossenfelder, used to love her takes on physics until she fell in the usual expert's trap of believing she can talk equally usefully about things OUTSIDE her expertise.
First trans care, which missed a few important nuances. Then autism, which had a decades-old perspective and was at best "not informative".
Then hoo boy Capitalism where she made a huge tangled MESS confusing and conflating markets with monetary systems and credit, all apparently based off half-remembered textbooks from 1950 using long-disproven historical claims.
A lot of criticism was sent her way. None was acknowledged, or apparently taken to heart. Repeatedly.
From skillfully presenting physics with a "explain it like I'm 5" style, she's now spouting any trending topic in a "explained by a 5 year old" style.
I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I've been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can't remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like "yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too".
...and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can't forget the plagiarism thing. ...I was like, "oh this all just makes sense now."
Penguinz0. His content was garbage when I discovered him so I just avoided him but one day I got recommended his old commercial parodies and it was pure gold. His videos about Kate cooking were also great too. Nowadays, he's a drama youtuber. He scroll Twitter, read about a random scandal, do the bare minimum research to not sound like a fool and then make a video about it.
Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD).
A few weeks ago he posted a new episode of his podcast with him and a few others. They talked about Nothing Chats and Sunbird, the iPhone getting RCS and the usual OpenAI drama. At some point Marques mentions the fact that iMessage with RCS will still be "unencrypted". Following that they ponder over why RCS wouldn't have this fabled encryption, such a weird thing that RCS doesn't support encryption from the get-go, and after brainstorming for a bit someone adds the information that it indeed will be encrypted in-transit, but not end-to-end encrypted. And what comes next boggled my mind: Silence ensues. No-one says anything. You only see the faces of four grown-ass tech influencers that are stunlocked and completely unable to process what this neverheard difference between encryption methods might mean. It all just ends with "I've been trying so hard to figure out what that means. I can't." And then.......then they simply move on, not even addressing for a second this knowledge gap and solving it right there on the spot. You can watch it if you want. What hurts the most is that Marques' co-star, David, the guy that looks the most confused, made a 1+ hour history-lesson type video a few months ago about the history of the internet and the importance of HTTPS encryption.
Now, if we're talking about visual quality and overall visual production quality, his videos were insanely enjoyable to watch. I also don't want to shame anyone for not knowing something and I understand that this is in part the consequence of an ever growing company at this point. The channel is still growing and has reached 18 millions subs. Him (and his team) also cover a constantly growing tech sphere, from phones to laptops, from e-vehicles to supercars, from tech politics to tech blunders. But coming from a guy that has been a "tech influencer" on YouTube for 14 years, a guy that over the years had the chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai and surely had the chance to surround himself with experts on all sorts of topics, a guy that dedicated entire videos to Nothing Chats, the role of Quantum Computing in encryption or the dangers and potentials of the Metaverse, this kind of shocked me. I just couldn't take him seriously anymore and I hate myself for it. But it's like my grandma not knowing the difference between a normal call and a WhatsApp call, expect that he's been talking about tech for more than a decade.
Never would have called him a favorite of mine exactly, but a channel I used to watch was Shadiversity. Had some interesting videos on medieval life and castles. These days he seemingly only does "let's test this wacky weapon" videos and has a terrible second channel where he whines about "woke culture".
Joshua Weissman. He started out super chill, most of his recipes were pretty approachable, the editing wasn't over the top, the b-roll stuff at the end was tasteful.
Now it's like he's catering to a whole different crowd. The editing is over the top and jammed with memes, he's more idk, psychotic isn't quite the right word, but it's way less chill, he's constantly saying stuff like "if you don't use XYZ ingredient then what are you even making this recipe for?", his recipes are more over the top, and he has a much more elitist opinion of himself and his food. The change happened so quickly too, it was kind of shocking.
CinemaSins. They were always kind of bottom-of-the-barrel, but their early videos pretty much just amounted to narrating the IMDB trivia pages so it was harmless. I went back and checked in on their channel for the first time in 8+ years and holy shit they've gotten bad. Videos running a quarter the length of the movie they're doing with word-salad voice over that doesn't even make sense.
Also: "[female actor] isn't 18 in this scene" was just as fucked up in 2012 as it is in 2023.
I have the opposite problem where Youtubers who I watch because I enjoy their unedited, off-the-cuff content keep deciding to put more effort into their channel and start producing videos that are scripted and edited well, which I find way less interesting and watchable than their stream-of-consciousness rambling was. WolfeyVGC is a big one. He theoretically has a second channel for low effort content but he rarely posts to it.
CGP Grey. His last 114 or so videos were literally just a single round of rock paper scissors each.
Kidding. His videos are still great.
Rooster Teeth
They have had so many issues back to back that I don't enjoy them anymore. From Ryan coming out to fucking fans when he has a wife, to the underpaid and crunch heavy work they put staff to, and then firing Matt who was one of the most beloved members.
When they sold their company to WB they sold their ethics at the same time.
Boogie. Not a favorite of mine and hated the Francis stuff, but I used to watch some of his gaming videos. He did his weight loss surgery about the same time as a relative so found that interesting. But good lord it's been a descent since then,all of it self inflicted. Be it saying something stupid, firing a gun within city limits while getting into a pissing match with some other YouTube idiot, or losing his money in crypto. It's hard to imagine someone that's fallen further than him.
Watched the documentary on him last month and then went through his channel and it was embarrassing.
Possibly controversial but... Hot Ones.
I prefer the older videos with less/no post production effects. I tried watching the interview with Elijah Wood but the fading video overlapping, music, zoom ins/outs, the voice echoing, and I couldn't deal with these stupid transitions. Closed the video and haven't got back since. The channel has one job and that is to make people eat progressively hot wings but the stupid post production effects ruin the video quality and make the whole interview less engaging. COOL IT SEAN!
Their content is good but how it's presented is garbage.
Hate to say it, but Wintergatan and his Marblemachine X. In the earlier days his videos were an exciting mix of mad genius, cool music improv and crafting. Then he became obsessed with making the machine play tight, precise music to a level that is beyond what anybody in an audience would be able to hear, and it became obvious that the machine would never get finished because he was stuck in an improvement loop.
Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I'm not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it -- literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.
I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the "teachers are secret pedos" and "the war in Ukraine is a hoax" variety. Super sad to see.
Less "downhill" and more "dropped into a sinkhole straight to the pits of hell," but Creepshow Art. I thought she was really fun to listen to, and it was interesting hearing tea spilling from a community I'm not privy to. At some point she opened up about a stalker who'd been following her for years, harassing her constantly, trying to get her fired from her job by sending compromising photos from her past to her boss, threatening her life... And then it turns out she was the stalker, and the victim was Emily Artful! She was the psychopath threatening someone's life and trying to get them fired and shit! And I was planning on donating to her patreon!
not a youtuber, but I genuinely enjoyed babylon bee and the daily bonnet for parody news about christian and mennonite culture. the humor was always inward. now its all propaganda
Jimmy Dore. Started watching in 2015. He was consistently about progressivism and brought awareness to causes such as Medicare for All. As the channel grew, he slowly became more deranged. COVID came and he found a larger audience spouting anti-vax dog whistles. The channel is now tabloid anti-vax, pro-putin, hot garbage.
Idubbbz. It's fine that he grew out of his edginess, I largely have too, but most of his videos now just feel like he needs to pay the bills and just cranks something out.
Jake Tran. His old videos were pretty cool. He went downhill ever since he tried to convince me that drinking soy milk turns people into femboys and losing sperm cells.
The Damage Report. Holy fucking clickbait titles, man, and then the content is incredibly uninteresting.
"Ben Shapiro just ended his career!" and turns out he just ate an unpopular flavor of ice cream to own the libs.
AvE. I wish he'd have kept his political comments to snide funny side comments. But the straw for me was his arguing against masks and repeating covid conspiracy dog whistles.
Typical case of a person becoming (fairly) widely recognized as a smart domain expert and thinking this translates into being an expert in other fields. It happens, sadly, so often with Youtubers.
SVSeeker. At first it seemed like a really inspirational channel about a guy building a giant boat in his backyard in Oklahoma that was going to be used as a free to anyone research vessel, but as time went on everyone slowly realized the dude had basically no idea what he was doing and was super hostile to anyone telling him otherwise. Now it's been two years since lunching the boat and he has done none of the things he promised to do with it (like even leave the coast) and it seems pretty clear everyone got duped into helping him build a retirement house boat instead of a research vessel.
I used to watch Big Clive and supported him on Patreon.
Then he started going off on wild shit about weird conspiracy theories about vapes being harmless, and government just wanting to get rid of them and lying about the lung damage or something to that accord.. and of course, Covid had to come into it to, where he made wild claims about it just being a regular flu and the whole response was blown out of proportion and really dismissing it as a threat.
I dont know how far he's fallen since then since I cancelled my patreon and fucked off from viewing.
Dave2D - Not a huge creator, but he lived in a van and made videos mocking other van-lifers who did the glamping thing and only showed the positive side of van life, not the negative side where you poo in a bucket and live in fear of a crackhead breaking into your car while youre asleep in it.
One of the glam-van-life couples broke up and he made a video publically mocking them. Then the girl killed herself. There was a huge shitstorm in the vanlife community and he ended up deleting almost all his content. Now he mostly does fantasy artwork livestreams.
He was never a favourite content creator of mine, but some of John Campbell's videos at the start of the pandemic were very informative. Then he started getting high on all his own hype, reporting more and more dubious psuedo-science, and getting into stupid spats with other YouTubers and pandemic 'celebrities'.
Used to like old MoistCritical, now it's all just drama, stream reactions and an occasional sex toy video. Also took up a gambling site sponsorship for one of the podcast episodes, so I stopped watching him and haven't seen the channel in like a year. Maybe he has changed though in that time.
Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter - their fall from grace was slow at first. First yet another corporate sellout and Bernie leaving, then the employee scandals - especially Ryan. RvB outlived itself and it was their prime thing. RVBY went downhill after Monty died. The new talent wasn't as entertaining as the old, and then the pandemic really kicked their ass.
TIK History.
Tik went from solidly researched war history to not-so-solidly researched political and religious theory. I did not appreciate it. Veritas et caritas recently raked him over the coals for it, which I am grateful for. Hopefully he returns to his area of strength, and resumes making quality history content.
Commanders quarters. Started as an interesting budget build magic the gathering commander deck channel and in less than a year went from that to click bait, 7 videos a day between 10-15 minutes about spoiled cards from whatever the new set coming out is. It absolutely flooded my feed and was completely worthless.
There was also some drama about the lead guys opinions about other IPs getting cards (the walking dead being the first) and how it was the end times for that particular flavor of inked up cardboard.
Fabulous Crusty. I don't hate his work or his decisions, as he wanted to do what he liked, and he found a new audience with it. Absolutely good for him.
I miss his old content he probably decided was cringe, or perhaps YouTube deemed controversial like his playthrough of Rinse and Repeat. Rinse and Repeat isn't controversial as far as I know(?) and had censor blurs. As someone in the LGBTA, I didn't find his reactions to be inappropriate, and I liked his exploration of the jank of that game. Although I'm not sure why he played it, other than "this game is weird, it'll get clicks."
He's deleted or delisted a lot of my favorite videos from back in the day (or I can't find his old channel, not sure). I hope he's doing well, I just miss the really random weird stuff he was playing. I did enjoy the Shadow of War stuff though.
Sam Hyde/MDE, some hilarious stuff before Trump then they just became boring political trigger/shock humor. He has this weird feud with Heidecker alleging he convinced Adult Swim to cancel his show which Tim denies as ridiculous. Hyde can be hilarious but he ruins it with sincere right wing politics and trying to be as offensive as he can for the sake of it.
Sips from the Yogscast moved to mostly Twitch, and it sucked all the soul out of his content. I dislike streaming in general, because watching people interact with the randoms in their chat is not entertaining, but it felt especially bad for Sips, since his videos used to have so much effort and personality, but that was all lost on Twitch. I'm sure he's making more money now, and that's great, and I'm glad he found a good way to do his career that he's enjoying, but I just can't watch him anymore
Lex Fridman.
Van Oak Props. He had some very cool, very intricate builds that were a lot of fun to follow along with.
Now that there are sponsored videos, those videos are somewhat short, almost half assed builds just to use the sponsors product. The quality in his videos and the props he makes have gone down.
PhoenixSC. They used to create very interesting niche technical Minecraft videos. Then they once made a "cursed Minecraft" video which became very popular and created a lot of memes. I still liked it then but they kept going that direction and now their channel is just stupid memes.
Gardiner Bryant I liked him when he was doing Linux News updates and talking about Linux gaming but after he blew up with the LTT Linux challenge.
It's like his personality shifted and has that I'm being managed vibe and doesn't hide it very well. I'm glad he found success but he is just not for me anymore.
I just checked back in and I guess he is just a generic gaming handheld reviewer now like we don't have a million of those.
Forgotten Weapons.
I think guns are neat, and Ian's channel is a gun oriented one without the reactionary politics. I wouldn't say his quality went down, but he (this was a few years ago) did a series on Rhodesian guns he got from a collector. I thought it was gross, but not necessarily bad. Lots of people are interested in Nazi stuff without being into the politics.
But then, in the middle of the George Floyd protests, he covers a grenade launcher (Like the one from Terminator2) that shoots rubber bullets and a bean-bag firing shotgun in the same week. Weird time to cover riot police gear. I haven't watched since.
In this thread I see broadly two types of complaints:
- Videos have degraded in presentation or production in some way.
- Person said something I disagree with so I don’t like them anymore.
Both fine, but I think the latter is just a bummer and really reflects a much deeper problem of the times in which we live.