YouTube Content; art in its own right, or just easy watching and background noise?

[Pooky]

Part of the scandal around Somerton is that he was plagiarising, the other part was that he (and his assistants) were drawing their own conclusions from insufficient and scant evidence and presenting them as fact. As far as I know he is rare in the former, or at least the extent of the former, but the latter is a pretty big problem on YouTube and the internet in general. A lot of "1+1+we can assume the 3 are all somewhere, so 5" type thinking, and I'm not just talking about conspiracy theorists or similar.

 

[Light Lucario]

I kind of wanted to get the conversation started in a general direction first, but I'm happy to say who I'm alluding to. The recent scandals involve James Somerton (Video Essayist, accused of extensive plagiarism and false information), and The Completionist (Video Game Content, accused of charity fraud). The historic controversy I allude to was Jontron (said...some things).

The VH1 shows are a good point of comparison...but I got pretty sick of those after a while too.

I've heard of all three scandals, although I'm surprised that I didn't realize you were alluding to Jontron earlier. I've watched a couple of Somerton videos, even though I can only remember one on the Black Swan movie. I was subscribed to the Completionist, but I usually only watch some of his videos on games that I played through and/or were interested in checking out. I liked some of his top ten list too, but I unsubscribed after hearing more about that scandal. I watched some of Jontron's videos too, but after hearing about what he said, I immediately stopped.

As for the topic at hand, I think that it can be both. There is a lot of easy to make kind of content on YouTube. People fall asleep to these videos or basically making visual podcasts. While I enjoy review videos on different media, I've watched plenty of reviews with bad/questionable takes and I hate when they ignore lines or events in the show/movie for the shake of a joke. But I've also watched documentaries and video essays that are well researched and produced. Art doesn't have to be only high quality stuff. I think that you can describe a lot of videos as different forms of art too, but there is plenty of value of having easy to watch/background noise too.