YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out
I worked building content sites pre-youtube stars that the same audience gravitates towards. Primarily, I was one of the main designers on giantbomb and gamespot over the years.<p>The publishing industry is kind of terrible, and the line between real journalism and critique died somewhere around 2008. If I were to pick a point, I&#x27;d look to when Jeff was fired by CNET after he gave Kane and Lynch an unfavorable review. But you can see it in the degradation of every major gaming news outlet that used to have full-time employees with a platform stable enough to not bow down to PR teams.<p>That type of blowback would never happen today because any journalistic wall between the PR folks pushing these products and the content creators no longer exists. YouTube has successfully weaponized content. We like to talk a lot today about how great it is that we don&#x27;t see ads. That&#x27;s kind of lie. They are certainly there and we see them everyday, it&#x27;s just now embedded in the content itself. The journos can&#x27;t compete, because the PR firms block access to coverage unless the story is preconceived. As an example, back in the day we used to boycott Call of Duty &quot;review&quot; events where they&#x27;d fly you in a helicopter at a hotel so you could play the game for 6 hours with someone over your shoulder.<p>Fandom and &quot;fun&quot; content creation was always a loose proposition (&quot;will i still be doing this at 40&quot; was the bar night saying), but now it&#x27;s just a quick hit slog. I sympathize with these folks to a degree. They&#x27;re all independent, they all have no idea if this will be a job even next year, so of course they will take on any sort of shilling to keep their dream going. They need to hustle. It&#x27;s like running a one-person startup.<p>I&#x27;m more worried about the 10s of thousands of other sad bedrooms where this is pushed as a real industry and a way of life. When startups fail, we engineers and designers fall back to jobs with the skills we learned. It&#x27;s not as easy for people whose skill was trying to be funny on camera. There&#x27;s a lot of people chasing the dream at the moment, and of course that&#x27;s no different than trying to be a movie star, but part of me winces when I open up twitch and see that all this awkwardness is so public and often permanent.<p>If anyone is curious about where some of this could go, I&#x27;d recommend reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a sort of near-future fiction that got a lot of this stuff right before it happened. I consider it the Network (as in the 70s movie) of our age. I fear for the day when the influencers and streamers make their way out of their bedrooms and into our public spaces, and we&#x27;ll all be part of the show.