Todd In The Shadows

  • 🔧 At about Midnight EST I am going to completely fuck up the site trying to fix something.

Is Todd In The Shadows a lolcow?

  • Yes

    Votes: 126 30.1%
  • No

    Votes: 61 14.6%
  • Todd is Lolcow Adjacent

    Votes: 231 55.3%

  • Total voters
    418
Oh boy. Todd in the Shadows. Always the controversial figure here since he rides the line of lolcow pretty closely without really being lulzy enough to be considered one.

For what it's worth, I respect Todd as a creator and genuinely enjoy his content, far more than Anthony Fantano's. I see some people here saying that he still has an "angry reviewer" shtick, and the odd thing is that over time I've noticed him mellow out a lot and since the dawn of his show he's gone less for the low-hanging fruit and has actually gone for some variety in his jokes and writing, and for the most part tries to be fair to the things he's reviewing.

Obviously, OHW and Trainwreckords are probably some of his best content, but I do enjoy his top/bottom 10 and his Pop Song Reviews when he's talking about the cultural background of songs and such. Overall I believe his strengths lie heavily in the journalism aspect of his reviews and not in his actual personality (although he does take potshots at himself sometimes, and I find his self-deprecation some of his best jokes he does every now and then).

Regarding his twitter obsessions and the crowd he hangs out with, even though he used to hang out with Lindsay Ellis' crowd I think he's pretty bog-standard liberal compared to that group which is a bit too far left for my taste. Sometimes his politics get in the way of his reviews (Rick Derringer's OHW is a particularly egregious example), but other than that his politics don't really get in the way of his content too much. Even the most obvious political video he's done in a while, the review of Am I The Only One, is pretty fair to the Staind guy and even chooses to attack him for his daddy issues moreso than for his politics.

Overall I enjoy him a lot. I respect his music journalism greatly and find his content pretty rewatchable.

With that being said, here's video of his face:
(starting at the marked time, goes until around the 5 minute mark - you can see him both side profile and front. You can tell why he usually shows himself from the side.)
 
Which Todd review do you guys think is the worst?
There was a period after Lindsay stopped producing his videos at the start of 2018 when the editing took a BIG drop and he was pretty pissy. The one that stands out the most as try-hard was probably Freaky Friday
In general though, there was a bit of shift that came around right before moving to California that he got a little too up his own ass, publicly defining himself as a music critic instead of a comedian. So, about at the point of this tweet:
TitS_egotrip.png
I don't begrudge the man his success at all; in fact, I respect the fact that he has managed to thrive on the internet on his own terms without sacrificing his privacy or too much sanity. But as much as I like the TrainWreckords for their educational value, they aren't as funny as his earlier stuff. Whether that's because of Lindsay's influence going from snarky self-deprecation to "only-I-can-wokescold" idk but it's been a notable shift where the humor feels forced and doesn't land. That's why I really like the recent OHW "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" because it very much felt like a return to form, light and funny.

Anyway, this one was funny because codpiece:
 
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Anyway, this one was funny because codpiece:
Don't forget this other song they did. Really stretching One Hit Wonder, isn't it?


I don't begrudge the man his success at all; in fact, I respect the fact that he has managed to thrive on the internet on his own terms without sacrificing his privacy or too much sanity. But as much as I like the TrainWreckords for their educational value, they aren't as funny as his earlier stuff. Whether that's because of Lindsay's influence going from snarky self-deprecation to "only-I-can-wokescold" idk but it's been a notable shift where the humor feels forced and doesn't land. That's why I really like the recent OHW "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" because it very much felt like a return to form, light and funny.
I remember there was a time when people said Todd should ONLY do OHW and TW, and the only time he should do current music is for the year end top 10 lists. Do you agree with that?
 
I remember there was a time when people said Todd should ONLY do OHW and TW, and the only time he should do current music is for the year end top 10 lists. Do you agree with that?
Not necessarily. It's his channel, he'll do as he pleases and "should" is probably my least favorite word. Tbh I'm not much of a fan of the yearly top 10s either, given the amount of whining he does about them. The historical ones are kind of fun but he hasn't done one in forever because he said they were too much work. IMO his PSRs get way too bogged down in The Message/Discourse, where he's clearly tiptoeing around minefields trying not to get cancelled while demonstrating that he really doesn't have much to say about them (which isn't an insult; a lot of music rn is just boring). Were he to do something different, maybe a video form of Ramble On where he just talks about a random song he likes would be good for the simple fact that he actually has something to say about it rather than review monkey makes rent by cranking out content.
 
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Not necessarily. It's his channel, he'll do as he pleases and "should" is probably my least favorite word. Tbh I'm not much of a fan of the yearly top 10s either, given the amount of whining he does about them. The historical ones are kind of fun but he hasn't done one in forever because he said they were too much work. IMO his PSRs get way too bogged down in The Message/Discourse, where he's clearly tiptoeing around minefields trying not to get cancelled while demonstrating that he really doesn't have much to say about them (which isn't an insult; a lot of music rn is just boring). Were he to do something different, maybe a video form of Ramble On where he just talks about a random song he likes would be good for the simple fact that he actually has something to say about it rather than review monkey makes rent by cranking out content.
At the very least, he hasn't gone as melodramatic about his plight as Lindsay has in her "Walking Away From Omelas" post. Yet.
 
At the very least, he hasn't gone as melodramatic about his plight as Lindsay has in her "Walking Away From Omelas" post. Yet.
Well, that's part of the appeal: regular unpretentious guy reviewing music and being silly on the internet. He said himself at one point that his videos have a high floor but low ceiling, much like his Patreon, with impressive consistency. It helps avoid the drama that Lindsay thrived on. And for a casual viewer unfamiliar with Todd's cowish tendencies aka twitter spergery and Gamergate/CTC history, that's good enough. To the poll on the thread, he fits in a third category of "questionably cow-adjacent", much like Jenny Nicholson. No one is surrounded by that many lolcows without getting something from it. He's a vicarious drama llama.
 
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What helps him seem like less of a cow than Jenny is he doesn’t sound so smug in we’ll his reviews. That’s what so annoying about Jenny: the way she speaks about anything makes her sound like a smug, bitchy know it all.
 
Well, that's part of the appeal: regular unpretentious guy reviewing music and being silly on the internet. He said himself at one point that his videos have a high floor but low ceiling, much like his Patreon, with impressive consistency. It helps avoid the drama that Lindsay thrived on. And for a casual viewer unfamiliar with Todd's cowish tendencies aka twitter spergery and Gamergate/CTC history, that's good enough. To the poll on the thread, he fits in a third category of "questionably cow-adjacent", much like Jenny Nicholson. No one is surrounded by that many lolcows without getting something from it. He's a vicarious drama llama.
Well I call him Icarus.
 
What helps him seem like less of a cow than Jenny is he doesn’t sound so smug in we’ll his reviews. That’s what so annoying about Jenny: the way she speaks about anything makes her sound like a smug, bitchy know it all.
I tried watching one of her videos where she tried on a bunch of Halloween costumes and it just did nothing for me. Having no interest in the topics she covers, I only keep an eye on her as part of the Lindsay Ellis Extended Universe, in which she is currently the most successful person as measured by paypigs. I find it interesting how many people refer to her as a naive, innocent girl next door type who just fell into her success because that shows how good she is at public image management; no one with her level of reach or platform is so unaware.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what this means.
Sure. A lot of YouTubers have a low conversion rate of subs to views, for example The Quartering has over 1M subs but on average his videos get maybe 150K views so a conversion of 15% or so which is low but not uncommon. Todd has had between 250-475K subs and almost all of his music review videos have at least 200K views, giving a conversion of over 40%. That's the high floor or minimum number of views. This is even more impressive when you consider how frequently his videos get removed for copyright issues; if they were allowed to stand, his views would be much higher.

That said, he only has a few videos that break 1M views and those are typically the year end top 10s. He doesn't go viral or make the trending lists. Most videos have around 400K views, a relatively low ceiling or maximum compared to someone like Lindsay who broke 1M views regularly. It's still a really good way to show that his subs actually watch his videos and he didn't have to buy a bunch of fake subs, which makes him attractive to sponsors due to high engagement despite a relatively modest sub count. So: high floor, low ceiling.
 
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Sure. A lot of YouTubers have a low conversion rate of subs to views, for example The Quartering has over 1M subs but on average his videos get maybe 150K views so a conversion of 15% or so which is low but not uncommon. Todd has had between 250-475K subs and almost all of his music review videos have at least 200K views, giving a conversion of over 40%. That's the high floor or minimum number of views. This is even more impressive when you consider how frequently his videos get removed for copyright issues; if they were allowed to stand, his views would be much higher.

That said, he only has a few videos that break 1M views and those are typically the year end top 10s. He doesn't go viral or make the trending lists. Most videos have around 400K views, a relatively low ceiling or maximum compared to someone like Lindsay who broke 1M views regularly. It's still a really good way to show that his subs actually watch his videos and he didn't have to buy a bunch of fake subs, which makes him attractive to sponsors due to high engagement despite a relatively modest sub count. So: high floor, low ceiling.
Ah, makes sense. EmpLemon actually brought this up a long time ago in one of his anti-Youtube rant videos where he touched upon bloated subscriber counts and empty followers. He mentioned VSauce who has millions of subs but also gets millions of views per videos, vs. clickbait like WatchMojo that has more subs thatn VSauce but gets around 50-100k views per video. I believe Emp's video was in regards to Pewdiepie and T-Series from a few years back.
 

It's fine. Except the rap to the Fresh Prince theme, that was cringe in a sad way. This one didn't really have much analysis and seemed more of a cherrypick to fit the new image of Will Smith the bitter slapper.
 
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I thought he would be black for some reason. Also he was trying to hide his real identity? I had no idea I thought he was just doing the character because everyone else on the site was.
When he first started he was still working as a substitute teacher and wanted to maintain some semblance of anonymity, especially when rubbing hamburgers on himself or moaning like in the Rihanna S&M video. Then he got MRSA on his face and it just became an effective gimmick.
 
When he first started he was still working as a substitute teacher and wanted to maintain some semblance of anonymity, especially when rubbing hamburgers on himself or moaning like in the Rihanna S&M video. Then he got MRSA on his face and it just became an effective gimmick.
Didn't know any of that. But still I'm more surprised he's not a black guy. I really thought he was.
 
Trust a guy named "TitS" to pussy out. He named moderately conservative black man Larry Elder, and totally batshit insane retard lady Wendy Williams in the same sentence, and called Larry Elder the 'nutjob' of the two.
 
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