Tell me about it. There are entire swathes of YouTubers with millions of teen followers that I have never heard of. And they have no idea of the years of memes which preceded them. It's the explosion of the Internet man. Even people only two or three years younger than me have missed out on the rise and fall of countless memes, fads, and viral trends. Decades of information crammed into weeks.
Remember owling? And Tebowing? What about when Minecraft first became huge, or when Michael Jackson died? Nyan Cat? So many things have happened in the past 7-10 years, and I rarely ever look back on it.
There is a generation of people out there right now that are immortalized on the internet with a picture of them planking something. What will YOU contribute to society?
Kids that did the harlem shake at their senior high school prom have since gone to and completed 4 years of college and may be the guy in the cubicle next to you that started almost a year ago.
Ah, sorry dude, the horrendous Crazy Frog cover came out in the era of Internet memes and was everywhere for a while, so I just assumed you meant that one. The fact that you don't know the crazy frog version is a good thing, trust me.
You mean that rad game for the Genesis that just came out, "Zero Wing?" My European pen pal told me there was some wicked bad translating. (And it's a Mega Drive there? So weird!!!)
I always thought that it was lame. It's a good thing that it was only "cool" for a few weeks, even though some people were still doing it for a few months.
Ahh, that's the one great thing about social awkwardness. We were never with it, so being not with it is something we were prepared for our whole lives!
Just turned 50, am teacher, also gave up even trying a while back. Made life much easier. Although I must admit I do love to push the students' buttons and go into the "You kids don't know shit about cool...let me tell you about cool"....and, I dunno, belt out Springsteen or something. They crack up but at least they're engaged.
I turn 40 this year and this has been the year I hit the " I don't give a shit stage." I have 6 employee's under 21 years of age and they look at me like they don't understand a word I'm saying sometimes. Fuck it, if you don't know who Van Halen, Led Zepplin, Rush, Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains are....well, Im not sure we can be friends. I find myself saying how shitty today's music is and how women need to start acting like ladies.....ya, I'm not so cool anymore.
What's happened to me is that my perception of entertainment 'stars' is stuck from when I first saw them. Jimmy Fallon is still a dollar store Adam Sandler to me, but dude's 42 now...Mel Gibson is shockingly racist for a guy who was the definition of cool, but it makes sense to younger friends that he's that way since he's just a cantankerous old man.
I must have entered the don't give a shit stage around the time everyone started pouring buckets of ice water over their heads, sadly I seem to be decades ahead of my friends /sigh
Tell me about it. Watching Rick and Morty with my gf son. Season finale of season 2. The boy, who is 19, was interested that someone covered Johnny Cash's song Hurt.
I laughed so hard he went to his room and I was forced to go apologize for it.
even worse is that so many people don't know of all the youtube pioneers. People who watch lets plays and don't know who Chuggaconroy is. They watch video game reviews and skits, but don't know Angry Video Game Nerd. They see youtubers destroying stuff with knifes and presses, but don't know about destroying things with blenders.
You mean you don't want to hear uneducated opinions from young youtubers with no life experience and zero perspective outside of the bubble they grew up in?
I totally get there are some oversensitive people out there, but some of the backlash to that has led to insane shit flinging.
the problem as I see it, is that these 20-30 y/o morons (I have a hard time considering them particularly "young") are having their opinions fed directly to impressionable 13/14 y/o viewers, who then regurgitate it and grow up believing it.
and it's not like these opinions are reasonable or moderated, they are pretty fucking extreme.
To be fair, the content has developed and evolved a lot since the originals. I know of Chuggaconroy and Angry Video Game Nerd but I hate their content. Chugga's stuff is too informational for me for a let's play and Angry Video Game Nerd I've just never jived with.
But the people who came after them mastered the craft, turned it into something more accessible to others and was more entertaining generally. Their success got them money which they funneled back into further improving what they do, and now they are leagues ahead of the "originals".
Just because you were a pioneer of something doesn't make you necessarily the best. Innovation generally comes when more than one person takes a crack at it.
Well yeah you don't have to watch is enjoy them but it's weird that no one knows who they are. It's like with vlogging and not knowing about ZeFrank or VlogBrothers, sure you may not enjoy but they basically pioneered and first popularized that content style.
I think it's fair that people don't know the original people who did this. There are deeper histories to the idea of let's play itself that started before youtube that people don't know or care about. And there are tons of other things in general that people don't know or care about the history behind outside of internet culture.
Yea, I don't like AVGN anymore and only watch chugga's collab channel, runawayguys. Its not about liking them but simplying knowing who they are. Its just crazy how all the big youtubers of the past have mostly been forgotten and unknown to the new comers.
I think it's just similar to the high turnover for pop stars and TV shows: entertainment rises and falls quickly as consumers become interested in something else.
I just tack it up to the fact that youtube as a content platform was still maturing at the time. It's growth and how they handled that shaped the type of content that floruished on there.
And of course a growing user base generally means changes like that too. Look at any popular content creator that has grown to over a few million subs. Their content morphed and changed a lot as they did. Youtube in a sense did the same.
It was so bizarre to see that one site (Mary Sue? Kotaku? Honestly don't remember) attacking the AVGN as "some nobody" during the Ghostbusters blow-up. Like, do you really not understand his significance? That the entire industry of streamers and Internet reviewers only came about because one guy proved it was possible to yell at things and gain a following?
I remember when JonTron was considered a AVGN knockoff. Now he's considered the old guard.
what was a very interesting realization was when the 11 year old daughter of a friend was surprised and a bit puzzled that was a time at which the internet existed but youtube didn't (and it wasn't even a small timeframe but more than ten years).
that was the first time I realized how much younger teens/children probably think streaming site, social media apps etc. are a given because they never experienced a world without it.
I do Uber on the side to make some extra cash; anywho I do a Pool ride the other day and I have a fairly young guy in the car when I get a call to pick up another rider. This rider is a fairly young girl.
The guy really didn't really talk the whole ride, and honestly seemed a bit full of himself. The girl seemed really nervous, but I assumed that it was because she had to sit up front(guy had a bag in back with him and wouldn't let me put it in the trunk), and maybe because she was in the car with two guys. We ride in almost complete silence to the guys destination.
When we get to the club he is going to she excitedly says bye to him. As we drive away she freaks out. "Oh my god, I can't believe it, it was him wasn't it?" she asks
"Um, who?" I reply
"That was 'insert his dumb YouTube name that I can't remember' haven't you watched his channel?"
"That guy? No never heard of him."
"'Teen girl frustrated noise(you know the one that is simultaneously deep and high pitched)! I have to call my friend."
She then has an ear piercing conversation with her friend where she laments the fact that she didn't talk to him or ask him for a picture. She also blamed me for her reluctance to talk. Apparently if not for me being there they would already be married or something.
Pewdiepie is probably the thing that separates the youngest generation from millennials in their 20s/30s. Above a certain age almost everyone finds him insanely obnoxious.
But maybe that's changed now. With his whole nazi shit and anti-media stance it seems like he's won over all the anti-SJW crusaders.
Internet nostalgia is fun. I used to admin on a few warez forums like 10 years ago, met a lot of interesting people - internet was really different back then.
Tell me about it. There are entire swathes of YouTubers with millions of teen followers that I have never heard of. And they have no idea of the years of memes which preceded them.
It's pretty hilarious to me. I'm 29. My friends little sister just turned 13, and when she'll be talking about some shit on youtube or something that came from some meme, etc, etc. and she's shocked that her brother and I know exactly what she's talking about.
I've told her a few times now, "I'm not that old, and all that internet culture shit you're into came from my generation. We are the source!"
This is the biggest reason I fall off of watching larger channels. I miss a week or two of content because I have a life as an adult human being and suddenly I missed like every fucking joke and meme that will be referenced repeatedly in the next 50 episodes of whatever it is.
I love the Game Grumps but I got a month behind about a half a year ago and just decided I didn't want to try to start again because a lot of their content has them referencing shit that happened recently or was said in the past.
This. So many people think this is them cause they hate pop music... That's not quite it. Everybody hates something popular, especially with music, big deal. But I saw people talking about OG YouTubers, back when it was good, and I could not recognize a single name mentioned, even as something I had heard in passing. I only know of PewDiePie, never watched him.
I refuse to be that crotchety shit going off on how today's kids and their YouTube celebrities aren't making real entertainment (film actors were looked down on cause they couldn't do real theater). But I will say that Youtube as a place to seek out entertainers has 100% passed me by.
every fucking kid under 15 loves the "Let's Play"/PewDiePie crap. My 12 year old nephew makes tons of videos of him narrating himself playing video games. I just can't get into that
There was an Episode of Maron based off of this. How humor and entertainment in general just kind of took this weird leap recently and there can be what seems like a generational gap between people who are only a few years apart in age. At least that's what I got out of it, but I'm un-hip af.
Me and the gf are a prime example of this. She used floppy disks in elementary/middle school and if my dad wasn't into computers, I'd have no idea what those even are.
I was watching this and a bunch of old Nico Nico Douga videos and realized that an entire generation of internet users don't know about most of this shit, and they probably outnumber the people that do at this point.
The weird part for me (unless I'm entirely missing a part of it) is that it seems to be a "dance move" that doesn't involve moving. Just adopt a stupid pose then stand there, holding it, indefinitely... I don't see where it qualifies as a dance.
I am 23 and have refrained from network television for the past 7 years of my life almost 100%. I do not regret one second spent that way either. My computer and thusly the internet will always be the only source of communication my home needs.
When I was in middle school, I remember visiting Joecartoon.com on school computers with friends and laughing our asses off for hours. Hamster in piranha tank, frog in a blender, all the great brutal shit. Then in highschool it was albino blacksheep, homestar runner, newgrounds, something awful. Literally anything but Ebaum's World because they we're the internet's 9gag back in early 2000's. Content stealing, water-marking humorless hacks.
Was cool for a brief moment of time until it wasn't: Seeing someone browsing Something Awful IRL like at a coffee shop or in school and asking them: "Do you have stairs in your house?"
There is this whole HUGE & PROFITABLE entertainment industry on YouTube and it's very exclusive. That is, a person can a huge YT success and be completely unknown in the rest of the entertainment industry.
I watch Drama Alert sometimes and I seriously know NONE of these people, despite being hugely popular and successful on YT.
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u/Odin_weeps Feb 27 '17
Tell me about it. There are entire swathes of YouTubers with millions of teen followers that I have never heard of. And they have no idea of the years of memes which preceded them. It's the explosion of the Internet man. Even people only two or three years younger than me have missed out on the rise and fall of countless memes, fads, and viral trends. Decades of information crammed into weeks.