this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Jenny Nicholson is a really popular video essayist. She only releases like one of these essay videos a year because she spends so long working on them. (She's got a patreon where she releases a smaller, lower effort video every month.)
The big videos routinely pull in millions of views, so I'm not surprised the algorithm spams it in people's feeds. She's got a lot of followers that watch it right away because they've been waiting for a year to see it, so it shoots to the top of the recommendations for other people in that niche. Then there's a snowball effect where YouTube starts recommending it, more people watch it, so it gets recommended more, etc. You see the same thing on Hbomberguy's yearly video.
As one of her subscribers, I can tell you that this video has been in the works for years, so we've been hearing about it for a long time and were hyped. I just finished it today - broke it up into three different viewings. She breaks all her essays down into chapters so it's easy to watch just a portion of it at a time.
I had never heard of her. I do not watch influencer videos. I do not like influencer videos and suspect I would not like them personally. The 4 hour long runtime clearly indicated I would not be watching it.
I am now a subscriber and big fan of her work!
The cascade of bad decisions by Disney was so enjoyable to hear about and her experience with 'Disney magic' was so very relateble. I too have been placed behind inexplicably large columns, felt the arbitrariness of the 'experiencing the magic', and spent far too much money for the privilege of standing in sweaty lines in the Florida heat.
I feel bad for the people involved that really wanted to make something great but were crushed under the weight of corporate ineptitude. I personally knew someone who went, refused to say how much they paid, and refused to talk about their experience. Now I know why. Excellent video. She's like the NeverKnowsBest of theme parks.
I'm curious and confused on the "influencer" part. My understanding was influencers are just people with "popularity" (manufactured users usually) pushing products in a "native ad" sort of way, never attributed it to general youtubers unless there's something about the creator I'm unaware of.
I used the term loosely to include the average "YouTuber", a term I hadn't thought of. I tend not to watch any of them.
Dismissing youtubers for being youtubers reminds me of people who dismiss all animation because "cartoons are for kids" or whatever. When I think of "influencer" I think of an instagram model who pushes products on their followers. "Youtuber" includes many content creators who devote hours into researching, writing, filming, and editing high quality, entertaining, and educational content.
Jenny is on the low end of the spectrum in terms of basically all of those categories (I love her though), but channels like CaptainD, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube and Folding Ideas create extremely high quality content that (in my opinion) surpasses educational content coming out of any studio.
tl;dr: Dismissing youtube channels as "influencers" is narrow minded and may prevent you from enjoying content you would otherwise find to be of extremely high quality.
Fair point
To be fair she does actually lightly use the word in this video to describe herself, but only in order to describe how Disney as a company might view her.
I keep thinking "surely I won't watch the entirety of this Vampire Diaries video yet again." 5 hours later...