Reply All: #73 Sandbox
August 11, 2016 11:37 AM - Subscribe

One twin decides to plug her internal organs directly into the internet so the other twin can monitor her. Plus, PJ and Alex talk to a listener whose heart was broken by last week's episode.
posted by radioamy (11 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Oof, the story of PJ's aunt being sick at camp and the counselors not letting her call or write home was devastating. Poor thing! The two of them must have felt really helpless.
posted by radioamy at 11:39 AM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


My girlfriend was obsessed with fashion vloggers and the like, and she has been vlogging for, like, 13 years, so it has been very frustrating for her not to get the sort of following others were. She started obsessively watching some of the popular fashion bloggers and makeup bloggers and unboxing bloggers, trying to figure out how they did it, where their money came from, how they found audiences, etc.

She came across a few stories that confirmed what she suspected: They weren't making it. They weren't making any money, and the amount of work it required was obscene. And she started noticing that a lot of these YouTube stars had very public meltdowns, which is understandable, as they probably didn't realize going in that celebrity, even minor internet celebrity -- especially minor internet celebrity -- is often accompanied with all sorts of horrible shit, from harassment and bullying to trolling to just the exhaustion of having your private life picked apart, and being in the middle of the sorts of frantic and oversized wars that only really happen in small and cloistered sub-groups.

Now she's happy making her vlogs and getting a small audience, even though she once wanted to be able to make a living doing it, because she doesn't have to deal with any of that.

I made a video once, a short documentary about the last week of Tiny Tim's life, that has beem seen 200,000 times, which is small potatoes in the online world, but even with that I feel like I need to constantly do cleanup duty, keeping the comments section from turning into a cesspool. I can't imagine what it is like for people who gets millions of views on every video. It must, at times, feel like you have opened your door to an avalanche of shit.
posted by maxsparber at 12:27 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


I had feelings about the segment about Internet success as well. I've done some things on the Internet that I poured a lot of effort into that didn't achieve any kind of audience. The lesson I took is that if you're doing a thing, you better be doing it for your own enjoyment, because odds are no one else is going to care about it. If it does catch on, that's wonderful too, but you have very little control over that. Thinking about it more, this attitude also protects you from getting stuck in some horrible project that you have to keep doing because it's popular.
posted by chrchr at 1:59 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


First Segment:
At first I was like, "Oh no, they're just enabling her extreme anxiety and she needs help!" And then she told her story about taking care of her sister and the extent to which her sister is sick and I kinda got it. I mean, sure, everyone could use therapy and I'm sure her anxiety is a bit extreme, but I got it. Because that must have been so hard to grow up like that. I also started to tear up a little when she said "I can go to my sister and say 'Look! You had a really good day!' " because the good days can get lost. I'm currently dealing with a chronic illness and I totally understand not recognizing the good days. So it seems like it's currently a positive thing and while she probably needs to address the anxious tendencies and controlling tendencies I actually came out of this not thinking that the specific situation in regards to sharing the glucose levels wasn't that crazy.

Second segment:
I totally knew what snippet they were going to discuss from the last episode. I too totally cringed when that girl totally disregarded anyone under 600K subscribers. I know it was slightly sarcastic but that "oh good you tried"sort of attitude was so dismissive of people's work. I'm only 26 but I find the whole "gotta get followers to have meaning in life" thing so crazy. And hell, I'm in digital marketing so I totally understand the need for followers and interaction. But there's so many things I watch that have less than that many subscribers and the YouTubers or Instagrammers seem really happy with where they are. Not everyone can be famous - that's not how famous works. So yeah, I have conflicted feelings about internet-fame or popularity because it does seem random. Though I do think that personality plays a role more than people think so even if you're doing everything "right" maybe you just don't "click" like the popular people. But yeah, having an Etsy shop and and working on my personal Instagram page is just daunting to try to grow your reach and then you see people posting things you see as "worse" (bad photo quality or whatever) and they get more followers and interaction. It's quite strange.
posted by Crystalinne at 7:18 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


I made a video once, a short documentary about the last week of Tiny Tim's life, that has beem seen 200,000 times, which is small potatoes in the online world, but even with that I feel like I need to constantly do cleanup duty, keeping the comments section from turning into a cesspool. I can't imagine what it is like for people who gets millions of views on every video. It must, at times, feel like you have opened your door to an avalanche of shit.

Yeah, sometimes I wish I could say that I was the sort of person who kept on trying for that huge audience after getting contextless 'fucking cunt' email and that it didn't bother me, but truth is that I took my experience from that and figured out trying to really get that many followers just isn't worth it. I mean, I wasn't even big and people were bothering to track down my personal email for hatemail. I know people say you sort of get used to it, but the sheer number of fucking cunts you get when you have a sizable audience - how can you stand to even try to communicate with anyone?
posted by dinty_moore at 8:53 PM on August 11, 2016


Which podcast has the first section already been on?
posted by ellieBOA at 4:35 AM on August 12, 2016


The first segment aired as part of the podcast Invisibilia's "Outside In" episode.
posted by harujion at 6:37 AM on August 12, 2016


The version that was on Invisibilia was different, though. Same story, edited differently.
posted by primethyme at 9:38 AM on August 12, 2016


Charming!
posted by bq at 4:49 PM on August 17, 2016


I was in the audience for Kazemi's XOXO talk about winning the lottery. It was quite uncomfortable for a few minutes, no one was quite in on the joke. XOXO is mostly a sincere and irony-free event, so it was a bit unexpected. You can watch the talk with audience reactions. It was great.

I've definitely experienced the randomness of (minor) success with my projects. But each success has been dependent on one specific person highlighting my project somehow. Tweetchive got some traction when Twitter designer Doug Bowman retweeted it. My river map got a lot of traction on the back of a kottke.org post. Logs of Lag is not famous, but to the extent it's gotten a lot of usage it's when some random gamer happens to post about it on the League of Legends forum.

I don't know how to turn this experience into repeatable success. It sure ain't buying ads to simulate viral uptake; that doesn't work for me. All I know is now when i see cool things from other people I try doubly hard to amplify them, with credit, because maybe it will help them.
posted by Nelson at 7:43 AM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I also found that line off-putting in the first episode, though it sounded more like jealousy than anything else. "Sizable-ish [...] Which is more than I had [have?], but I hear isn't too impressive in the youtube world."
posted by jeather at 7:10 PM on August 29, 2016


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