There's currently some drama going right now because he uploaded this video
I don't see the drama in the video considering the guy who made the thread compared reaction commentary channels to companies like amazon that exploit people to maximize profits. He talks about the economy and at the end of it all, it's a big nothing burger.
He says fair use only allows the use of
portions of someone else's work, but in reality, fair use allows you to use however much is necessary to provide commentary on something. He uses a lot of economical terms and comparisons, but at the end of the day, it doesn't amount to shit.
If you meet a reactor at a party, I suggest covering your glass or outright tell them you don't want them to fuck you, because they seem keen to take a person's silence for consent.
That comes directly from DV's 14-page nothing-burger document. No shit they're going to be pissed getting compared to date rapists because "silence is consent". Reacting (or having your content reacted to) is nothing like someone putting something in your drink to sexually assault you just to drill in the fact that in his opinion they are bad people. Yes, reaction content requires significantly less effort than making the original content, but the arguments he makes for why some creators are fine with reaction content basically boils down to it being a necessity to be fine with it as opposed to the fact that some people just like having their content reacted to. Some content is made with the intention of having people react to whether on or off of a video. He also argues that reaction content is stealing millions of dollars from people and at the end of it all, they are all bad people who take silence for consent.
Even though impressions don't equal views, the thing with impressions is that there is no guarantee you will get them. You can make a video of someone shitting in the bathroom and it goes viral versus putting 500 hours of labor into a video that didn't get on anyone's feed. Also, saying impressions don't equal views does feel like a cop-out because the only thing that matters
is the views. If your video ends up on the feed of 500 people but no one clicked on it on actually watched it, you got impressions but no views. An impression does little to nothing for a content creator. Views, likes, comments, engagement, etc.
that is what matters.
He also puts people who do genuinely try to put effort, humor, into what they're reacting to versus people who just sit on their ass, play the video and eat lunch. You also have to consider that people who watched a reaction may not have bothered to watch the original video anyways. The people who follow someone whose content got reacted to discovered new content and then you have people who only watched it because a reactor watched it but really have no interest in the content otherwise. If you take out the reaction you've basically removed the possibility of the smaller creator getting people who discovered something new and now they're basically just relying on the algoritm.
When it comes to people like Pokimane and Disguised Toast streaming anime with the intention of getting a DMCA or ban, it is vastly different from reacting to someone's content. The first being is that these anime and music companies use bots to file their DMCAs. They don't give a fuck about fair use. They just have their content into an ID pull and just flag it. It's why things like AMVs also get flagged despite being fairly transformative (It's basically making a music video out of anime clips) because the companies don't sit down to review the content and then decide whether they're going to flag it or not. Creators, whether they have a million followers or not actually sit down and consider whether or not to file a DMCA on someone.
The only people this document really means anything to are people who see terms like "trickle-down economy" and "capitalism" and see that he has a graph and assume wow this guy must know what he's talking about guess he's right. His diagrams don't have any actual source or numerical value that can be verified, they're just there with numbers we can assume he pulled from his ass. It isn't similar to capitalism in the way that he says it is due to the fact that reactors make a profit off of the large audience
they have. Critical makes a good point in that people generally watch the creators... When Ninja left Mixer, no one stayed there... they went elsewhere. Similarly, even if reactors stopped reacting at all, their audiences would just continue watching their content, they wouldn't trickle down or away from anyone else.
Therefore, even if reactors stopped reacting there is no way to give that money, those views, exposure, etc. to smaller creators because now they're just left to fight the algorithm. If reactors had taken the content, reuploaded it, and claimed it as their own then yes you have an argument for stealing content.
But even the laziest ones don't claim it as their own content or try to pass anything other than their reaction off as their own so it is a moot point. Stealing content doesn't work like stealing a physical item. If you react to the president falling down the stairs or botching a press interview, you have not stolen from MSNBC unless you reupload the video in it's entirety with no reaction, no nothing added and passed it off as your own video.
He breaks people who create content and people who react to content into the "worker class" and the "exploiter class" and it's such a clear attempt at making him sound like he knows what he's talking about. It's once again another example of big words me smart. Creators do not pay other creators on YouTube. Youtube pays creators. If anything,
YouTube as a platform would be the exploiter class who just has preferred or higher positioned workers. By extension Twitch as well.
Reactor commentators are not
preventing smaller creators from getting views. The YouTube and Twitch algorithm is. There is an argument that they stole views and money, but there is no way to prove that if they didn't react, the smaller creator would have
gotten those views and money. He also places large commentators like XQC, Hasan, Pokiman, Critical, etc. as if they are "competitors" in the same way that a company like Amazon, Walmart, or a small business would be, and that isn't how it works.
To give an example:
Companies like Alienware and Corsair are competitors because there is a finite amount of money people have and they basically sell you the same product. Gaming computers. You can make the argument that they also compete with Apple, but Apple isn't even in the gaming market. Apple is a fashion tech company or being more charitable Apple focuses on minimalistic technology for school and work. Therefore, it's really only in theory that Apple also competes with Alienware and Corsair on the basis of selling computers. But when you look at the actual product themselves, someone looking for a gaming computer is unlikely to even consider Apple and someone who wants a computer to do schoolwork on is unlikely to consider Corsair or Dell unless they need a high power PC for things like animation or 3D modeling.
Similarly, content creators are that way. You are not competing against everyone on the platform in any meaningful way because content creators all bring different products to the table. On a surface level, the argument makes sense but when you actually consider it in practice, it doesn't. It is no different when people say someone like Pokimane or Amoranth is "stealing views" from someone. Like people who watch Pokimane or Amoranth are not going to watch a CoD dudebro. The audience that wants to see a pretty girl in a hot tub practically jacking off is not going to be the audience that wants to watch you speedrun Dark Souls for the fifth time.
Getting into reaction content, someone who watches Critical is probably not going to watch Hasan or BadBunny. Sure, there can be
overlap between audiences at some point because people do have multiple interests, but generally speaking, they appeal to two different niches and largely have two different audiences. When it comes to them reacting to someone, it works in a similar way. There may be overlap between the reactor's audience and the reactees audience, but they are still mostly different. If reactors stopped reacting entirely, it is no guarantee that the people they would have reacted to would have gotten anywhere or go a bigger audience. Sure, they don't lose anything but they also don't really gain much of anything either.
Making content for youtube, that you don't even get paid for, isn't like having to work for amazon to pay your bills. The first being is that there is no contract between YouTube and creators other than the TOS. You will probably not make a living off of YouTube. If reactors went away tomorrow, smaller creators would still be in the same position they're in now. There would be no net gain for them.
There is more I could say and pick apart, but TLDR: This document is an unhinged nothing burger that spans for 14 pages while saying nor proving anything. Just saying and making false arguments and comparisons to why reaction creators are bad people that ends with saying they're basically date rapists. His document neither proves nor says anything that is actually of value other than that some creator creators make the platform worse because they get DMCA'd to hell and back for watching anime and risk getting the platform sued.
