somesoups - Tumblr blog

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i want to be a firefighter when i grow up (im a 23 year old fresh graduate with a degree rendered worthless by today's capitalist stem-centric society)

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Made the worst brownies ever created just now

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Miles is ONCE AGAIN here with the jokes

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imma be completely honest, i just checked out the watchertv website and i can absolutely see why they were so excited for it - without context, it looks so cool and i would be SO proud of them cos that's huge you know? and i can absolutely see how this has been something they've been aiming for (i remember both ryan & shane talking about how it's been their dream to create high-quality, tv-level productions at various points in time).

but as many have said, a huge issue was perhaps in the execution. assuming this was a set-in-stone end goal for them, much could still have been done to transition the audience gradually to this new platform. ofc, i acknowledge that hindsight is 20/20 but, well. i have to admit that some aspects of how this was executed were indeed quite tone-deaf.

THAT BEING SAID, while i absolutely understand that this tone-deafness could have been extremely hurtful, using this situation as an opportunity to be racist, to attack steven's religion, or to harrass their partners on their socials is completely out of line. this whole fiasco has revealed a startling & upsetting amount of toxicity that is colouring the entire fandom in a really bad light.

also, while i understand that steven being the sole CEO position does make him more responsible over such business decisions, i truly do not think that the "steven is the only villian, he's threatening R&S with a gun" narrative is warranted. as mentioned above, R&S have both expressed their dreams of making high-quality productions (nothing wrong with that btw) and they're also both still the co-founders & main faces of the platform. there's a much higher likelihood that they were both on board with this, and pinning all the blame on steven like this to protect and coddle your 'faves' is frankly a little embarrassing.

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This is the funniest thing I've read today actually.

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more hours have passed since the watcher streamer announcement and i shouldn't have gone on twitter because the way people are talking about steven lim is pissing me off. just because you lot like ryan and shane more doesn't mean that y'all can say any damn thing about steven like wtf is this

REALLY??? a guy who sacrificed his own creative output to take on the financial responsibility for a company with two co-founders who categorically did not want to deal with the money side of things (all things that three of them have confirmed on camera during one of the making watcher episodes) is equivalent to a Yale jackass who cheated on his wife and let down his business partners? y'all have lost the plot.

choosing to limit your own creative projects and getting your hands dirty with the most stressful part of the job -making ends meet for your company and making it survive - so that your other two business partners can make the content they like to their heart's content is the kind of sacrifice that would put most of you in a grave. fuck off.

don't make this a "steven lim is a villain" thing. you're allowed to be upset at the announcement but pinning the anger on steven is unfair and unmerited.

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I need to (remembers to not make casual suicide jokes in order to encourage a more outwardly positive mindset and healthy conversational environment in my day to day life) kill myself

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My favorite funny moment that came out of the Watcher streaming announcement was people asking Miles (from the Try Guys) about the Watcher streaming service while he was live on YouTube and as he was about to speak a whiteboard fell directly onto his face and he took it as a sign from the universe not to speak

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The most important comment in this whole mess

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long thoughts abt watcher

its so weird to me that people are being like ‘you aren’t entitled to free content’ about the watcher situation bc that’s not the actual problem here. artists deserve to be fairly paid, but the watcher situation reveals a truly bizarre level of business incompetence and a lack of market research.

they actively cultivated a relatively young audience, actively claimed to be ‘eat the rich’ style liberals, then turned over and told that audience that they need to pay $6/month. which again, fine! dropout did it and survived, but dropout had so much more backing it up, went about the transition slowly, and on top of that, their audience was older and therefore had more spending money available.

watcher has none of that. it would be one thing if they had started marketing to an older audience months ago, or changed the style of their content to match the heavy production costs. but as it stands, they built their career off of relatively simple videos with a lower budget, gained a specific type of audience from those videos, then expected that audience to pivot with them when watcher realized they wanted to make a different type of (more expensive, more produced) content.

it can’t work that way. the audience is not acting entitled right now for feeling a shock, bc the audience became loyal to watcher due to a desire for a certain kind of content (specifically the dynamic between shane and ryan).

and if watcher wants to make different content and be paid for it on a more regular basis, that is also okay! but they severely miscalculated their existing audience, and definitely misunderstood how much their current audience wants to watch the style of videos they want to make.

also, imo, ryan and shane have admitted that they dislike the admin side of running a business. i think they truly thrived as regular content creators and not as business managers, and so they struggled to figure out how to run their company and ultimately handed over the reins to steven to wash their hands of it all and go back to making the content they want. and thats also fine, some people are not built for business and work better as individual contributors.

but ryan and shane and steven also seem to have a view that their simple content is almost… beneath them? they talk a lot abt challenging themselves to put out well produced content that their cultivated audience clearly doesn’t really care about. its a mismatch between watcher’s desires for the future and the audience they built in the past that ultimately led to this mess.

they had two options: easier option to make the type of low-budget content their audience has been proven to enjoy, or put in the work to build up an expanded audience so that they could fund the content they wanted to make, put in the work to do a longer, more well thought out transition, put in the work to make connections and figure out how to manage their revenue streams.

and instead they decided to take a shortcut and brute force their existing audience to fund their dreams, and in the process shooting themselves in the foot by alienating their audience. i just can’t comprehend how they reached this conclusion at all.

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“i can’t do this anymore” says a girl who is not only going to do it but do it well

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i'm like a stray dog in a lot of ways but i will not elaborate on that

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bro. bro you are romantisizing the secret history. bro you are enamored with the greek class just like richard. bro you are ignoring the bad things and creating aesthetics based on a book telling a murder of a young man. brother.

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Buck taking grainy, zoomed-in pictures of every single helicopter he sees and sending them to Tommy like “dis u babe? 🥰”

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I think the most interesting thing about the watcher situation for me is it doesn’t actually seem all that greedy when I dig into it (disconnected though? Definitely)

It just seems like they are trying to get the job they want making the art they want, which on the surface is to be applauded and I think a lot of people do recognize that.

However, they didn’t have the business acumen to realize 1) that’s just not the kind of content most of their audience is even there for (and no, they’re not obligated to make content tailored to the whims of the audience they have, but i think we can all acknowledge it’s the audience they have built, not random hecklers making demands here) and 2) that is not the business they’ve built thus far. Neither of those things are unchangeable, but that’s the status quo.

They’re a YouTube company that wants to be a TV network. Okay. But that doesn’t happen just by saying “we’re a TV company” any more than you can pick peaches by going up to an apple tree and asking nicely.

Streaming platforms producing their own shows have a huge amount of capital behind them. They can stay afloat for years on a loss while their customer base grows to a (maybe) sustainable amount.

Watcher is trying to replicate the same caliber of content (highly produced unscripted TV) made in the same way (made by full production crews) but without any of the financials that make that business model even potentially successful. There’s and obvious lack of understanding around production scaling, plain and simple.

It just really seems like these people have no real business sense. Something that is absolutely fatal when it’s combined with a gross overestimation of their audience’s willingness to support them in making their dreams happen, rather than a willingness to support them in making enjoyable content.

And that’s what makes me think it’s not greed. There’s so many overly parasocial takes on this about how “Shane would never support this!!!” and so on. I think that absolutely goes both ways here.

I think these three sat down with an absolute unwavering faith that their audience was parasocially invested in them achieving their goals (whatever those goals may be) because it had always shaken out that way, even when it was a risky business decision.

But when those goals and those risky decisions threatened the viability of the creator-audience relationship, the Watcher guys didn’t really notice.

Like it seems obvious to point out “your audience won’t support you if you make moves that guarantee many of them can’t be your audience anymore” as much as “your wife will want to leave you if you cheat on her” is obvious, but I genuinely think these guys were too hubristically high on their own supply to realize just how big of a pivot this actually is until the shit hit the fan

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me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU