Fredrik Knudsen / "Down the Rabbit Hole" Guy / Loren The Owl - Youtube documentarian turned gay furry vtuber

[Desu Mountain]

Finished watching it just now, and my review is...

It was good. It fell off near the end when he started relying on shitty animations rather than in-game footage, but overall it was pretty good. This might be the last thing Fredrik ever produces before his inevitable fall into troondom and suicide, but it was a pretty good last hurrah and reminded me very much why I liked Fredrik Knudsen's videos in the first place. I really hope his stuff all gets carefully archived so it can still be viewed in the future even if he goes full DFE.

Also, it has made me conclude that I will never play EVE Online because apparently I missed the good days and the updates of the last few years have made the game into pure shit where nothing really happens anymore.

 

[RazorBackBacon]

EVE video ain't never coming out. If a YT channel goes without updates for 2 years, it's never getting updated again.

Well, looks like I'm eating crow tonight.

I still ain't watching that shit, because I don't want to encourage this sort of nonsense from youtubers.

 

[Mad_Dog]

I listen to long videos about stuff I don't care about to help me fall asleep. It was so boring, I woke up half-way through and turned it off.

 

[Cryogonal2]

I’m trying to watch this but it’s so boring. Why all this work for a game no one plays or ever talks about? Why six hours? I’m not even an hour in and can’t focus I’m so bored.

There's probably a lot worth talking about with the autism and drama between goons and non-goons in and outside of EVE, but it's sounding like this is just a shoddily constructed wikipedia article read aloud by what sounds like a bored highschooler trying to impress the English teacher with a two million word count essay.

 

[TokiBun]

So I know nothing about Eve, it was popular before I was into online games. My attention isn't grabbed hearing about some company's backstory. Just get to the autistic stuff we don't need every little detail. This is why I usually don't watch GenoSamuel or The Right Opinion because they don't understand what brevity is.

 

[luigismanslave]

So I know nothing about Eve, it was popular before I was into online games. My attention isn't grabbed hearing about some company's backstory. Just get to the autistic stuff we don't need every little detail. This is why I usually don't watch GenoSamuel or The Right Opinion because they don't understand what brevity is.

credit where its due, this video is long and rambling, but at least it's edited. TRO is just 5 hour long rambles with minimal editing while he repeats points every 10 to 15 minutes

 

[Big Budoo Troy]

He narrated a 40k vid recently and it was fairly insulting he would even attempt. Won't do a 6 hour vid about ChrisChan or the grimdark but did one for Eve? He got sucked in, which is a no-no for professional distance if you consider yourself a documentarian.

but ~600k views in about 20 hours is nothing to scoff at + Patreon. I'd troon right the fuck out for that kind of money and pull.

Based on how surface level this video was, a 6 hour remake of the ChrisChan one would just be in the GenoSamuel style of reading out every single social media post for the entire video without any of his own takes, which is what the channel has been devolving into for a while ngl. The Deep Blue and May Island videos were basically just chronological retellings of events that anybody could make, the Wings video pretty much covered the exact same stuff Metokur's did in twice the time (seriously, did we need to spend 20 minutes of autistic detail on the Syndicate 1v1 when it could be summarised as Wings raging over getting his arse beat?). The only DTRH that actually benefits from being over an hour long is the TempleOS one because Terry (God rest his soul) was so utterly bonkers that his entire history is funny or interesting.

I actually don't mind videos like this being 6 hours long, I like them as background noise when I'm driving halfway across the state, but it has to have more substance to warrant the length. I feel like I came out of this with at best a surface level understanding of EVE, and it seems like he missed a lot of recent events so the information in this video could have been easily cut down to below 2 hours if he didn't feel the need to have so many direct quotations or talk about shit that doesn't really matter and ultimately went nowhere like monetization or the World of Darkness game. For something of a comparison, PatricianTV put out a 20 hour video on Skyrim which is far longer than you'd need to make a good analysis of the game, but because its still analytical I'd rather watch that than a 20 hour equivalent of something like Salt Factory's 2 hour video which is just a narrated playthrough pretending to be analytical. Fred's EVE online video falls into the latter category, it's too shallow to warrant such a long length. If its intentionally shallow, cut it down, if you want the run-time for autistic analysis then get better at autistic analysis. If you can't summarise well you need to either be very entertaining to keep attention for that long or you need to be regularly making your own points, and Fred did neither. I only listened to the full video to see if it lived up to the 2 year wait, if he actually still put these out regularly I probably would have tuned out after an hour or so.

Fred's better videos (in my opinion) actually benefit from brevity, since the sections that are just pulled directly from his sources feel less grating. The Rajneeshpuram, Time Cube, and Mouse Utopia ones come to mind.

 

[overweight]

is it worth watching the entire video in the background?
what is he gonna tell me except its all autistic retards roleplaying to escape their reality of being autistic retards?

 

[TokiBun]

is it worth watching the entire video in the background?
what is he gonna tell me except its all autistic retards roleplaying to escape their reality of being autistic retards?

Most of the thread doesn't think so. I've met like one Eve player recently, they seem to think it needs that much time but most internet people I've talked to argue it doesn't. I compare its pacing to the Wings or Chris Chan vids; you don't need the entire story, explain the concept then highlight the absurdity.
For what it's worth in the past two days Fred has gotten over a million views. I have no idea how that translates into youtube money though.

 

[Breadbassket]

Most of the thread doesn't think so. I've met like one Eve player recently, they seem to think it needs that much time but most internet people I've talked to argue it doesn't. I compare its pacing to the Wings or Chris Chan vids; you don't need the entire story, explain the concept then highlight the absurdity.
For what it's worth in the past two days Fred has gotten over a million views. I have no idea how that translates into youtube money though.

Video essay content is very hot on Youtube currently and a 6 hour long video will be loaded to the brim with mid-roll ads every few minutes which all in all considering that and the million views the video has received my estimate is that he should very easily be in the five digit range in terms of AdSense revenue. To be fair for a project that took ages to come out and make it would have to earn some money in order to be a success.

I'm curious if the EVE Online video overall will do better then his past work in terms of views and what he plans to do next. I see him either putting his nose back to the content grind stone for relatively easy money or trying to focus more on streaming.

Knudsen showed some details on how the video is doing in a tweet:

 

[Toolbox]

Knudsen showed some details on how the video is doing in a tweet:

He seems desperate to prove this is a success while at the same time acting like he's done over on his vtuber account. As some others have said I doubt these are the 'true numbers' knowing how YT actually treats views correlated with watchtime, this isn't 09 anymore.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

He needs to just release an edit where he cuts out all the wars because that shit is boring as fuck and can be summarized as "Autistic Trannies vs Regular Autists fight using spreadsheets" but the stuff about the company origins and how they struggled to do anything except EVE was interesting. I didn't even know they owned White Wolf before Paradox did.

 

[TV's Adam West]

Then you could do a proper fucking story on Goonsquad and have it build up to something we all enjoy: murder.

I cannot wait for some tranny to take this out of context.
Thanks for the laugh, Nool.

 

['Ole Dente]

Fun fact: CCP is a customer of Liz Fong-Jone's Honeycomb.io and Liz is personally involved in its development team. He's fielded questions in the EVE subreddit and has done Q&As with their devs.

I JUST re-downloaded EVE after the documentary. I haven’t played it in like 12 years, I was real excited, I got all comfy cozy to do some space shit, and now….I have to delete it. Goddamn you, Joshua Moon.

 

[goh]

He needs to just release an edit where he cuts out all the wars because that shit is boring as fuck and can be summarized as "Autistic Trannies vs Regular Autists fight using spreadsheets"

I think the war sections would've been better if he showed how unhinged most of these players are. Imagine the serious war documentary-esque explanations he gave followed by angry forum posts and autistic screeching. I think the video needed that contrast.

In and of itself, it comes across like Autism Wars (which, it is), but EVE players were notoriously broken people. It's a given, considering how EVE was essentially a second career for some of these people. You need to show how far these people have fallen into pure spergery. That's not the lolcow-enjoyer in me speaking; the video feels incomplete without it.
He treats the average player like they're just people who enjoy the game with the occasional bad apple here or there. I'm not an expert, but I highly doubt the reputation of violent, mentally-ill EVE players came from nowhere.

 

[Toolbox]

Breaking down Knud's brag autism even more - Deep Blue was behind the TempleOs video yet beat it over time by roughly 1 million views. The hurdy gurdy ended up being one of Knud's least successful Rabbit Hole videos, tying with GameLife at 1.5 mil.

If you take the first 38 hour's stats at face value, it should have gotten at least 3 mil if you relate it to TempleOS's stats - even better if you tie it with Deep Blue's eventual viewcount. Basing the success of a video in the long term on what it gets when it's 'fresh' is utterly meaningless, and even if it ends up being more successful than the Wings video it will not be worth the time supposedly invested in producing it.

 

[Judex Meus]

I'm probably echoing what a lot of people have already said, but even as someone who doesn't hate Fred and enjoyed a lot of this older videos, this one is really, really boring. Some parts were interesting - I didn't mind the politics between the different factions, the drama involved with the bad decisions CCP made, etc. But he has that terrible habit of reading direct quotes way too fucking much. If you cut out just the stuff he read verbatim from other people you'd probably reduce the video length by about an hour, if not more. He needs to learn how to fucking paraphrase because it contributes little to nothing to the overall content of the video.

Also, I'm baffled that the graphics and "animations" were supposedly what made the video take so long to be released. Most of them were illustrating shit that could have been shown by game footage, and even the ones explaining more complex aspects weren't even useful at conveying the intended information. For as long as his chess video was, at least it was useful in describing the events that he wanted to portray.

One last thing. This has been mentioned in other threads (and probably this one too) and it's not exclusive to Fred's videos, Same thing with Geno Samuel's videos. but I'm really tired of all YouTube comments on videos being nothing but fellating the creator. They're all variants on "This is a masterpiece, truly the most amazing video game documentary of all time. Bravo. All the updoots for you, kind sir." I don't know if it's that they're being curated, or if zoomers cannot communicate without constantly sucking off each other or what, but I miss the days where the comments section was filled with people either being funny or pointing out interesting things in the video. It's all so tiresome.

 

[JelloJerk]

I listen to long videos about stuff I don't care about to help me fall asleep. It was so boring, I woke up half-way through and turned it off.

Same but I actually found it perfect for sleeping. Unlike MauLer, who now puts really loud movie clips in his 6 hour videos which make them impossible to fall asleep to, Fredrick just talked and talked in his monotone voice and said nothing that would make me want to look at the screen. My one issue was that I got a sleep paralysis nightmare and his voice was still in the background, so when I woke up I turned it off at the halfway mark.

(seriously, did we need to spend 20 minutes of autistic detail on the Syndicate 1v1 when it could be summarised as Wings raging over getting his arse beat?)

I actually really liked that part. I don't play Call of Duty so I found the thorough breakdown interesting, and him explaining it in a WW2 documentary style was fun.

 

[luigismanslave]

Just finished it, finally. This video'a real problem is that it's 5 good videos instead of 1 great one. The story of the developer losing touch with their fans and falling into disarray as they attempt to move on is good, the faction politics and goons being awful is good, the evolutuon of the game over time is fine, but blending all of these together, fliping back and forth between them, sometimes leaving the story of one of these threads hanging for 30+ minutes makes it hard to invest in any individual plotline, and therefore hard to get attached to the story as a whole. It's just a bit cluttered.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

I watched some of it while doing other stuff, and it was was okay inspite of going into way too much detail. The video would probably have been great, if he had cut it down to a quarter length or less.

It is a shame that he has become such a brain dead degenerate.