- Joined
- May 29, 2024
It basically always comes from ignorance, largely just out of happenstance.
- People don't follow a creator closely enough (they don't watch that regularly, just listen in the background, etc.), so they don't notice the creator's changes in behavior.
- People just aren't that invested and they just don't care that much about this online stuff, so they can't be bothered to investigate anything that gets said about a creator beyond what they can see for themselves. If it doesn't come up obviously in the show, then it doesn't exist, and they've already forgotten what was alleged.
- People don't have any experience in their own lives with alcoholics or drug addicts, so they aren't able to recognize what's going on with the creator.
- People don't follow the creator on other sites, and/or they don't follow adjacent communities online, so they don't ever hear about news or rumors related to the creator.
- People can't reconcile a rumor that they hear with all that they've seen from the creator over the years and all that they think they know about the guy—and since the rumor is just a sliver of information compared to everything that they've seen from watching the creator, they just dismiss the rumor (it must just be another creator's jealousy, slander, shitposting, etc.), and they don't look into it any further.
- People dismiss issues that come up with a creator over a long period of time, one by one, thinking that each of them is just an unsubstantiated rumor, a one-off thing, or a minor quirk where, sure, it's weird (like the bottle-sniffing), but you can look past it—so they just don't notice the overall pattern that well, since half of the evidence for it is stuff that wasn't sufficiently proven at the time and got filed away in their mind as "excused." The more slowly a person encounters bits of evidence and excuses them one-by-one, the more any new piece of evidence will seem like "just another attack against this poor guy whom people are always persecuting."
- Some people are just too nice and guileless, so much so that they can't even imagine some of the stuff that's being accused, and they just don't want to believe that a creator could be as bad as people say—so they reject the rumors out of hand, they listen to the creator when he denies it because they want to believe that version of reality, and they don't double-check any of it.
- People just aren't that invested and they just don't care that much about this online stuff, so they can't be bothered to investigate anything that gets said about a creator beyond what they can see for themselves. If it doesn't come up obviously in the show, then it doesn't exist, and they've already forgotten what was alleged.
- People don't have any experience in their own lives with alcoholics or drug addicts, so they aren't able to recognize what's going on with the creator.
- People don't follow the creator on other sites, and/or they don't follow adjacent communities online, so they don't ever hear about news or rumors related to the creator.
- People can't reconcile a rumor that they hear with all that they've seen from the creator over the years and all that they think they know about the guy—and since the rumor is just a sliver of information compared to everything that they've seen from watching the creator, they just dismiss the rumor (it must just be another creator's jealousy, slander, shitposting, etc.), and they don't look into it any further.
- People dismiss issues that come up with a creator over a long period of time, one by one, thinking that each of them is just an unsubstantiated rumor, a one-off thing, or a minor quirk where, sure, it's weird (like the bottle-sniffing), but you can look past it—so they just don't notice the overall pattern that well, since half of the evidence for it is stuff that wasn't sufficiently proven at the time and got filed away in their mind as "excused." The more slowly a person encounters bits of evidence and excuses them one-by-one, the more any new piece of evidence will seem like "just another attack against this poor guy whom people are always persecuting."
- Some people are just too nice and guileless, so much so that they can't even imagine some of the stuff that's being accused, and they just don't want to believe that a creator could be as bad as people say—so they reject the rumors out of hand, they listen to the creator when he denies it because they want to believe that version of reality, and they don't double-check any of it.
I know that "mental illness" and "retardation" are the fun meme answers, but I think that, for the overwhelming majority of stragglers in an audience like Nick's, they just haven't yet noticed or understood the stuff that people like us know about. Whatever it was that finally pushed you over the edge, they just haven't come across that stuff yet.
Sure, there are the "sunk cost" people in an audience who have just invested too much in a creator, either emotionally or through superchats, to ever believe what's being alleged—but I don't think that this can account for that much of Nick's remaining audience. Superchat whales are rare, and so are insane people who will outright deny reality even when they're forced to confront it.
Even for the people who have just been drip-fed rumors and are primed to disbelieve them now, or for the nice soccer moms who have never even seen drugs in their life and can't imagine that a good Christian man would bring them into his family's home, *gasp*, I think that even they could be convinced if you just sat them down and showed them enough evidence. It's not impossible for them to come around. But it would take a long fucking time, if it ever happens. Most people are normies, perfectly content to never look into any of this shit.
