"Hey George, like and comment on my videos again."
"Sure, Lenny, I'm gonna write a real nice comment on your latest video right now." *sniffle*
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Cleetus McFarland. Glad he diversified and got successful, but death by product placement made me unsubscribe a year or so ago.
This was me with Ethan Klein/H3H3 over the past ~14ish months. Their podcast content used to be lighthearted Internet drama with funny soundbytes, but now the dude is having a major crashout about Gaza after rotting his brain with Israeli state ~~propaganda~~ media coverage. He's always been an out-of-touch rich asshole, but now he's so far out of pocket it's unbearable to watch.
h3 is an incredibly interesting part of internet fandom/history. my phones about to die but if anyone is into it, i’ve “personally been there” since the very early days of their channel and think i have a decent perspective on the entire dynamic here, i might do a little actual, extensive write up in an edit here when i get home later.
i find h3 is fun to discuss as throughout his history on the internet he’s unique in of that he has entirely abandoned his audience multiple times. on the outside he’s a hypocrite (which is definitely true don’t get me wrong), but i think “inside” it’s a more machievallian and sinister sort of thing. frankly ethan and hila not only do alt-right dogwhistling better than anyone else; they invented a whole new technique. idk what to call it. but their snake-y nature lets them subvert typical premonitions and community norms time and time again and infiltrate way further into communities any other alt-righter would get nowhere near as close into the spheres of.
I think h3 is kind of a hidden nexus of fringe->main stream internet culture throughout the last like 15 years. Every wave Ethan has ridden has never been the main thing, it's always right on the periphery of mainstream internet culture. That way he has cultivated a tiny amount of fans from every wave but never enough to get him into the public eye, and as a result everyone who knows him thinks they know someone "under ground" and he doesn't shy away from that branding.
I don't think it's Machiavellian. I think it's more just that Ethan has always held incoherent views (like everyone in the world) and his brand is to be unapologetically opinionated, so now that he's dug his heels in on Gaza there's no moving him until he has fully crashed and burned.
I mean he's Jewish and his wife is from Israel, they have family members or at least know people personally who are in Israel and have their whole life, so the propaganda they've been fed is ingrained in their family identity.
It's not an excuse, it's sad to see, but as you pointed out he's always declared himself a "capitalist" and has taken some pretty right wing positions. It's just to say it's not intentional, just a stupid dude who doesn't work to hard to form opinions about stuff. I wouldn't say this about every grifter, it's just that H3 started out much more innocently and I don't think they spent a decade keeping up a ruse like that I think it was genuine. I mean you really think he was doing Vape Nashe videos concocting how he was going to infiltrate internet culture to push right wing propaganda?
he had a weird sense of humor and was universally loved. how did that even happen.
At this point Ethan's final act will be picking a fight with reddit and losing.
I'm seeing this play out on the Hasan Piker side of things, and it's outrageous but also completely hilarious that Ethan will not have a conversation with Hasan or Sam Seder about Gaza. The propaganda of the State of Israel, and plain old sunk cost fallacy has left him paralyzed as a liberal. I hope he doesn't stay in that place for the rest of his days because it's destructive, but some people have to bottom out before they can come up for air. I just hope that means all the hate and trouble both sides of the American political divide give him doesn't lead to anything drastic.
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YMH. Vibe changed I dunno.
They got big and became a proper podcast studio with many shows.
"tell me about the likes and subscribes[sic], George."
Northernlion is all audience interaction now.
I found him searching super meat boy when he was about 50 videos into the binding of Issac, I couldn't stand that games themes at the time, but after he posted the hundredth video or so I decided to give it a shot, it was relatively entertaining and very easy to fall asleep to.
Now he just interacts with his audience, and it's really not my jive, still subscribed, but haven't watched a video in probably over a year.
I think it's okay that he doesn't seem to care that people come and go.
It's way more healthy for him at least.
I subscribed to him years ago when he was doing a regular "indie impressions" type series. He stopped doing it; I haven't watched since. Still subscribed on the off chance that he'll start it back up again...
It's surprisingly hard to find channels that are eclectic; usually the host will stick to a specific genre of games, which makes it hard to find new and unique ones.
His style drastically changed since he had his daughter.
This is like every ASMR creator with more than ~10k subs. I'm sorry but "go to my second channel/Patreon/linktree/whatever other shameless self plugging bullshit" for 5 minutes at the beginning of every video doesn't help me fall asleep even if you are whispering it.
Another algorithm casualty here, another out of touch rich guy there.
There but for the like and subscribe go I.
Not Lenny!
Of Mice and Men
Ah I was thinking of that, but didn't want to mention it in case I was wrong 😅
Lenny (that was his name, right?) Did Nothing Wrong btw, dude needs a psychaitrist, not an execution.
No. It’s clearly two men. I don’t see any mice.
The mice are in their pants!
Little little mice that scurry and scrape hoping nothing more in life but to manage to exist escaping the notice of those who's interest could only mean a swift death.
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It feels like you're the one being shot? Shouldn't the text say "How the YouTuber feels when you unsubscribe from..." if it's placed over Lennie? It's from not to, right? You can't unsubscribe to something. This is a mess
I think it's just bad text placement, if I'm reading it right you should feel like George, not Lennie
Am I the only one who has never been able to watch YouTube since it became more than a two minute clip of how to do a thing? The whole format of stretching content to reach some arbitrary monetization benchmark is unwatchable to me.
The whole format of stretching content to reach some arbitrary monetization benchmark is unwatchable to me.
Good thing there's plenty of content that isnt that format on the site
A fairly popular youtuber I follow has called Jim Serling's videos "great 5 minute videos stretched to 20 minutes". There was a point in time when the yt algo was favoring ~11 minute videos, so a lot of content creators would make a glut of low info videos stretched to that mark. It was so bad, that I was refusing to click anything around the runtime. Now, if I catch someone start reiterating themselves early on, I just close the video.
edit: One example of the ~11 minute video people was CinimaSins. They were never very good, but could be funny in small doses. When they started to stretch the video length, you started to realize how pedantic and media illiterate they were.
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Get sponsorblock, it automatically skips the fillers - if someone has annotated the video.
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Caddicarus for me. I love the guy, his new content isn't bad. I don't have time to watch a video that's as long as a feature-length film, wherein so much stuff is covered that nothing gets a spotlight for more than a few minutes.
=3
I'm actually kinda shocked he's still around. I was a young teenager when I was watching Ray's stuff.
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