Oh, I watch his chat a fair bit, and you're right that now there's significantly more trolling. The 5-7% number was from months ago when there was some trolling, but not nearly as much. I might do a quick-and-dirty ballpark estimate from last month to see what number I come up with. I know who most of the push-it-to-the-edge trolls are, like that vote_democrat person, so I might be able to get a better idea.
Fair enough. I always make a note about his chat because it seems a lot of people in "detractor circles" get the brunt of their information from restreams or other YT vids which don't accurately represent his chat at all: even if they scroll up/display a comment that got banned, or show a bunch of spam, etc., you miss the context and don't see the variety of people/repetition of names, or the whole context of what happened before and after that comment and things of that nature.
A lot of people just see a 1000 bit badge (~$10) and a 3 month sub badge and assume that person is a paypig or whale or whatever (yes, there's the 'you're still giving him money' argument), but if whoever was highlighting that particular message scrolled up 30 lines they'd see the same person spewing out 'detractor-related' memes or talking to a known troll or whatever. To use another strip club analogy, it's almost like paying a cover charge for a $10 bit badge and then a few bucks a month for a sub badge to sit at the stage. You have people like bentboxer who haven't given him any significant money in months, but he sits in there safely and constantly takes the piss out of Dave/derails chat because he's paid his due.
There's a lot of nuance that goes on a lot of people miss because they've never spent time in his actual stream. Glad I'm not the only one who sees it, tbh.
Quick Edit: Regarding trying to figure out who is/isn't trolling when looking at messages attached to tips, it comes to subjectivity with stuff, too. There's a lot of messages along the lines of, "Hey, Phil, huge fan of yours but finally watching a stream and want you to keep it up!" or shit like that which, in my opinion, vary in authenticity. One person might take them at face value and think they're all genuine fans, you might give them like a 70/30 split of fans vs. trolls, whereas I'd give them like a 50/50 split because of what I've seen in his chat. There's nothing to back any of it up, it's just what would feel right to me, even though I'd acknowledge that's a poor reason to judge it that way.
Stuff about FGC and DSP recording footage
D$P killed his Golden Goose all by himself.
Having been pretty into the FGC in that time (and also watching DSP's vids casually), I'll say that he maybe could've, but it would've taken a lot of work on his part.
By the time he would've been making money on YT doing that he had already sort of soured himself within the FGC's ranks. This was post-Jaha, this was post-Viscant, this was post-Evo 4th Place, this was possibly even in the Mike-Watson-Shits-On-DSP-During-A-Panel era circa 2010. He'd already gotten challenged to and backed out of a lot of confrontation for talking shit online and not being able to back it up (money matches or actual fights; the latter rarely happened, you usually settled shit on the sticks with your own cash, then get a beer with the dude).
I've already mentioned in other posts about how grass roots the FGC was, and that was true for video hosting as well. There was some dude named Zack, -- ironically, I think from the Seattle area -- who had a website originally intended to host tournament/money match footage for MvC2 when it was the most popular fighting game in the country, but eventually that expanded to other games and he was hosting footage on servers, operated purely on donations, and it existed before Youtube was even really a thing. The FGC already had people going around tournaments recording footage -- sometimes camcorder, sometimes direct capture -- and Phil wasn't special in that regard. Tournament organizers would upload all their shit to Zack's site and people downloaded it.
Now, DSP could've had an in with Team Spooky, who helped the FGC blow up on Twitch. Dave actually was decent friends with Arturo Sanchez (Art actually came up to CT every so often to chill and CT people would go to NYC -- whole tristate area knew each other), who you'd know as NYCFurby from the incident where DSP went in and shit on MvC:I and banned some dude with mod powers he had no reason to have. He was mod there because he was friends with Art.
Arturo was really good friends with Vic, who started Team Spooky out of the basement of some place he was renting in Brooklyn, I believe, and a few other people in the area who were friends with DSP were involved as well: Josh "NerdJosh" Jodoin, and Min... I don't remember his last name, but he's a chubby Korean dude who's super chill and likes to smoke pot and get drunk. He had every opportunity to repair his reputation with the FGC by trying to go through his connections to Team Spooky after he started to blow up on YT, but he rode that jump in fame and he just kept distancing himself from it by shitting on people and inflating his accomplishments.
Yes, he may have killed his own golden goose, but he would've had to do work to nurse it back from the brink of death because he was damaging that embryo in the womb more than he claims his mother did by smoking while she was pregnant with him.
