What is and what is not "Grifting on the internet"?

glib

True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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Apr 22, 2021
I see a lot of people calling "content creators" grifters.
A lot of the time this correlates with an individuals poor opinion of that content creator, or whatever you want to call it.

My question is, what makes one person a grifter, and the other person worthy of neetbux?
Is the entire internet a swindle for parasocial relationships? Or is it legitimate to donate/fund/support people through crowdfunding and patreon.

What is being bought, and what isn't?

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In terms of "grifting online" here's quite a few types and quite a few methods.
Video essay/review type grifters: 4 hour long videos for shit that has barely any content aside from bare minimum shit and looping talking points. Generally they work alone but there's some that are in cliques like breadtube. the swindling here is time and not actually gaining any considerable knowledge. Also money though optional but people like that make BANK for some absurd reason.

Artists/game devs/generalized project grifters: announce something, take a shitload of money for it, only to funnel the money into other shit instead and then claim harassment when people ask what happened with the project they paid for, going completely dark for months to years on end but also begging for more money to "stop the harassers" or some dumb shit sometimes before doing so. Idiots pay them thousands. There are MANY cases of this shit but one Big infamous case of this kinda grift is KONY 2012, though it's an outlier fromt he standard due to the fact I don't think it did the harassment claim shit and instead just skipped right to going dark and running off with the money. The swindling is the lack of a finalized product and wasted money.

Scam service sponsorship/eceleb grifters: There's a manipulative aspect to these, they aren't the main problem so much as the dishonest companies payrolling them to act a certain way. There's of course the blatantly scripted "raid shadowlegends" sponsor shit where they HAVE to list off game features and go "my favorite game mode is the arena where you-" I'm not willing to recite the whole thing, but that's like the most benign one compared to the other shit that's happened online with this kind of grift. Betterhelp and Candid are the 2 go to ones for the more insidious kind of companies in terms of this kind of grift. For those dthat don't reember, Candid was a chat/forum site app thing that was being promoted by various polular youtube people years ago. The thing is each of them had a different script to advertise it depending on what political leaning their audience was thought to be. People that criticized the sus behavior had all of them going after them in unison more or less false flagging and shit. In the end the thing turned out to be a censorship ai training site that once they thought it was good enough they shut it down and the grifter in charge of the operation got a cushy job at amazon. Betterhelp, a thing I STILL see occasional sponsors for, when it initially became a thing the sponsors had little "plotlines" of very blatantly acted and fake depression, meltdowns or breakdowns of a sort. General theatrics of mental instability, only to suddenly be better in the video they were shilling betterhelp in. If it weren't for that aspect betterhelp would be amongst translifeline in terms of grifts rather than candid. The swindling here is obvious, the people getting fucked are the ones who don't notice the sus shit fast enough and end up getting their info yoinked.

There's more kinds of internet grifting like eTHOTS and shit but if I keep going like this we're gonna be here all night.
 
In my experience, I've seen this through:

*Thinking you are a celebrity/expert on something and making videos blowing steam out of your ass
*Being a "pop culture journalist" and making shitty hot take sensation shit, like virtue signaling muckracking fake controversy/yellow journalism, making obvious promotional campaigns for being a diehard fan whore/sellout shill for, or making mindless top ten shit with surface value knowledge
*Being a "pop culture critic" (That Guy With The Glasses/Channel Awesome is a major example of this, and if time tells, so might be Cinemassacre)
*This kind of falls under the other umbrellas, but entitled fan culture hobbyists who hope to make money off of and/or "direct the industry" by their own self centered idea of "influence/taste" onto other fans by simply being a "paragon/stand out fan"; you see this a lot with "hardcore gamers" or "elite anime fans" who existed long before consuum culture was properly identified in the late 2010s/early 2020s
*Cosplay/Camgirls who take money from thirsty simps, and whose outfits on the convention floor or appearance on stream don't appear to see the money given invested into their beauty

There's more but keep it going, this thread's pretty neat
 
Been wondering about this especially in regards to Nicky Rackets. I'm not a fan (or a hater), but what did he do that he went from /ourguy/ to grifter?
Thats the inspiration for this thread. Was just reading this.

I make some kick around youtube videos, but I've never felt like anything I've been made is worth anything because I feel like there's nothing I do that I would pay for. Thats kind of what my barometer is. I'll give money to someone who is doing something I think has material value, or is worth supporting sans a regular job. So, donating to underwater hamster project for fun, a dude doing ballistic tests on ammo out of pocket, or some guy eating MREs from the 80s i feel like supporting.

But I don't think there's an objective line there, because what is the value of the result? Bullet tests inform my gun purchases, underwater hamsterss entertains me, and MREs are fascinating to my tism. Am I being grifted?

It's not like i'm subbing to twitch thots like neekolul or hasan.
 
It's a universal acknowledgement that basically nobody on the internet deserves money for what they do, and that its not actually that engaging or worthwhile to participate in. Yet stupid people still give their money away to support this dead, empty culture because they themselves are so dead and empty that they can't find anything with more meaning to spend that money on in their own lives.
 
This shit is what made it basically hopeless to try to google some things. I was looking for a short text HOWTO to refresh my memory, I don't want to watch a three hour video of some idiot fucker self-proclaimed specialist who knows far less than me talking in circles.
 
I generally consider anyone who has a KF thread to be an e-grifter. So sleep easy all 12 of you lewd artists on Patreon, you'll never be as bad as DSP.
 
I think of grifters as people who are insincere about their beliefs/motives/actions in order to make money off them. Like, if you’re just shilling something for money, you aren’t necessarily a grifter. But if you’re stirring shit up for attention so that you can get those shill bucks, it becomes a grift.
 
I think a large part of making grifter vs someone who gets donations on the internet is having no belief in what they do.

eg. Breadtubers talking about the evil of capitalism, landlords, and encouraging rent strikes while they buy their third mansion. Game Devs who start a project on Patreon and have no intention of ever finishing (either abandoning the project or forever adding new features).

Been wondering about this especially in regards to Nicky Rackets. I'm not a fan (or a hater), but what did he do that he went from /ourguy/ to grifter?
I don't know of anything recently, but back when I used the watch him around the time of the Vic lawsuit, the left accused him of not being a real lawyer, scamming anime nerds out of their money for a baseless lawsuit, etc.
 
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