Plagiarism and You(Tube)
December 3, 2023 5:05 AM Subscribe

HBomberguy's latest video is about plagiarism. It's almost 4 hours long but really worth a watch.
posted by Pendragon (316 comments total) 62 users marked this as a favorite

really worth a watch.

Can you expand on why that’s the case? Four hours is a pretty long time.
posted by zamboni at 5:26 AM on December 3, 2023 [37 favorites]

I'm seeing some reactions elsewhere like "you're in for a ride" and "OH SHIIIII" and "there's a twist"

if this ends up being about the defunctland guy I'm gonna be real upset
posted by Baethan at 5:36 AM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Before you want me to commit 4 hours of my life to watch something, something more than you need to watch this, is completely and utterly required.

I can only presume this post was plagiarized from a longer, better post.
posted by Comstar at 5:39 AM on December 3, 2023 [27 favorites]

I really miss the days of well-argued essays being a written form.
posted by The River Ivel at 5:54 AM on December 3, 2023 [84 favorites]

I have to say, even though I prefer to read rather than watch, this really is an enjoyable watch! Granted, I'm only half an hour in, and I don't think you have to marathon the whole thing in one go. He does start with a LENGTHY dissection of one guy's fairly inept plagiarizing, so I'm taking it on faith that this is all support for (one of) his thesis(es?)

(Which is that we can learn/see why people plagiarize from Inept Plagiarist, and that will help us recognize more subtle & artful forms of plagiarism.)

Things I like about this video so far, having never watched nor heard of the creator before:
He seems very competent, which I find relaxing.
The video is visually pleasant.
There's a wealth of specific, on-screen sourced references so all this seems well-researched, which I particularly appreciate when it comes to delicious drama.
Delicious drama.
He's going somewhere with all this and he'll make sure we're all following him okay. Not to the extent that it's patronizing or tiresome, but in the sense that I don't feel I need to take notes.
posted by Baethan at 6:17 AM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'm ~~Fellini~~ 8½ (minutes) in and I'm not bored yet. I used to supervise MSc theses in Pharmaceutical Regulation. One guy, from foreign, 3rd language English, gave me a first draft of his proposal which wrote about the power of the US Nourishment and Medicine Executive. "Do not plagiarise" had been replaced in his mind (and for some of his peers) with "use thesaurus for all the long words". Once we'd parked that, he went on to do a nice bit of research, comparing anticancer drug regs under the FDA with its EU Oppos". The case at 8½m in, is similar. Onwards!
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:23 AM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

For those who prefer to skim there is a transcript button on the YouTube page. After pressing it the transcript will appear next to the video.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:30 AM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm only a bit in myself, but here's a good pitch for the video from a user on r/196:

On a more serious note, it's a genuinely good exploration of a serious topic, especially (for a large portion of it) about the erasure of queer voices by other, louder queer voices, who pretend to be doing the activism the people they're stealing from are actually doing all while profiting far more from that very same stolen material that the original sources ever did.
posted by Rinku at 6:30 AM on December 3, 2023 [17 favorites]

Metafilter’s tagline is “the best of the web”, not “some random links”. An argument for why this specific video about plagiarism is a particularly good one is not an unreasonable request.
posted by eviemath at 7:04 AM on December 3, 2023 [59 favorites]

I've been eagerly anticipating him dropping another video soon, his last video was two hours about the "oof!" sound from Roblox - a topic I would have had zero interest in, and a video I wouldn't have watched if I wasn't familiar with hbomberguy's work, and it's genuinely one of the best things I watched last year.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:05 AM on December 3, 2023 [16 favorites]

To build on what Rinku posted, the first two hours are about two or three creators that got caught plagiarizing and what happened to them (I especially liked the one that got a YouTube copyright claim that everyone assumed was done by mistake, because those are always mistakes, except this one wasn't).

The rest of the video seem to be (I didn't watch the whole thing) about one specific (apparently very popular) creator who apparently hadn't been caught yet until this video. The guy gets ripped into little itty bitty pieces. Reading the video comments, apparently he started taking his stuff down within a couple of hours of the video being posted, i.e., before anyone could possibly have finished watching the video.

There's a list of chapters under the video that you can use to skip around if you like; that's what I did. I enjoyed the conclusion because HBomberguy lists a bunch of the original creators who got stolen from and summarizes why their stuff is great.
posted by Ampersand692 at 7:11 AM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

We also have the FanFare subsite for posts that are just “here’s the most recent video in this series”, where the series can include YouTube channels as well as formal tv series, book series, etc. Things get posted to the front page from FanFare periodically when they have a broader cultural relevance, or are particularly good along some axis. But it’s also reasonable to ask why this is on the blue rather than on FanFare.

Thanks for the informative comments from folks who watched the video!
posted by eviemath at 7:12 AM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Used to be, you could just post a link to MetaFilter without writing an entire essay.

I have been around since 2006 and I am very hard pressed to remember a time where someone posted a four hour video with almost no context and wasn't asked to expand their description.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:16 AM on December 3, 2023 [55 favorites]

Used to be, you could just post a link to MetaFilter without writing an entire essay. Alas, those days are gone.

The video is about plagiarism on YouTube. That's the video. If you don't want to spend 4 hours watching it, that's on you. Just skip this post and go do something else.

If you want someone to spend half a work day on something maybe it is worth spending two minutes to write a sentence explaining why it's worth that much time.
posted by JDHarper at 7:27 AM on December 3, 2023 [34 favorites]

"Mystery meat" posts have been discussed on the grey before, which is perhaps also where the meta discussion could go.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:28 AM on December 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

“ HBomberguy's latest video is about plagiarism. It's almost 4 hours long but really worth a watch.” does actually constitute context.

I’d maybe wrap a previously around HBomberguy if I posted it.
posted by Artw at 7:49 AM on December 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

well in 2019 HBomberguy's livestream raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mermaids as a big fuck you to graham lineham. so there's that
posted by lalochezia at 7:55 AM on December 3, 2023 [22 favorites]

having never watched nor heard of the creator before

you are in for an absolute treat if you feel like watching him eviscerate the anti-vax movement.

Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response (hbomberguy, Piped/YouTube, 1h44m9s)
posted by flabdablet at 7:59 AM on December 3, 2023 [25 favorites]

I've been on MeFi in one form or another since 2003 and often overlook opportunities to post things I find interesting because of the pro-forma essay question requirement and "previouslies", much of which could be retrieved by the curious with the help of a search engine. After all, that is what I would use if I arrogated myself to attempt a post. Shorter posts were a lot more common in the 2000s and somehow the site survived.

Anyway, hbomberguy is one of the mainstays of BreadTube, which should offer some context.

A dogmatic requirement for lengthy prose from posters is probably an invitation for more faintly-obfuscated AI-generated content from people who have other things to do.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 8:03 AM on December 3, 2023 [21 favorites]

If you want someone to spend half a work day on something maybe it is worth spending two minutes to write a sentence explaining why it's worth that much time.

I disagree with this. I have posted long videos before without much of an explanation other than the title link and a bit of a description and usually I'm not trying to convince everyone to watch it, I just want to share something and people will auto-select if they are interested or not.

Is every post on metafilter supposed to be for everyone? Because if that's the case, I should have complaining in a ton of posts instead of simply skipping them.
posted by simmering octagon at 8:03 AM on December 3, 2023 [28 favorites]

Started watching it last night, exerted all of my willpower to wait to finish it until this morning, because what do I love more than a plagiarism scandal?

The focus of the last half of the video is James Somerton, who did a video about queer representation in Disney movies that turned out to be basically just an extremely close, uncredited paraphrase of passages from Sean Griffin's book Tinker Belles and Evil Queens; and he did a video on The Celluloid Closet, but large parts of it were essentially just The Celluloid Closet with Somerton dubbing a close paraphrase of the narration in his own voice; and there's plagiarism from dozens and dozens of written essays and video essays about film and TV; and when I say "close paraphrase," I mean that he seems not to even have tried as hard as a seventh-grader copying out of the encyclopedia and exerting some token effort to put things into their own words. Somerton has been called out before but mostly reacted with denial / deflection / accusing other people of harassment.

It's a good watch.

I no longer teach first-year composition, but if I did, I would be thinking about how I could use it to teach first-year composition students about plagiarism (without asking them to watch a 4-hour video).
posted by Jeanne at 8:07 AM on December 3, 2023 [21 favorites]

Not used to seeing so much grumbling about lack of detail. Oh well. Give it a go, rather than having a go, eh?

Me, I watched this earlier and thought it was a fascinating, depressing, necessarily forensic deconstruction of a video. I loved the way he ends with a playlist of creators who do the work who are well worth a follow. And as to the main meat of the video - its main character - it's a necessary litany on the business of bad content by those lazy, dishonest and entitled, and who control the world view of their audience with the selective story they present. Could have been a little more about the system that produces this kind of farmed venality (but it's implicit it's capitalism, innit - and it applies to the Wildwest of podcasts, too) and a little less drama, but it is a dramatic story, in truth, and one full of personal and political consequence. Thoroughly recommend it.

There's a great point about how queer people are banished and erased from history by those who write it, and how this long running plagiarism is actively doing that to any number of stolen sources. Nice touch for HBomberGuy to be donating out any money from the video to the uncredited people who really earned it, but had it co-opted.
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 8:08 AM on December 3, 2023 [13 favorites]

"Mystery meat" posts have been discussed on the grey before, which is perhaps also where the meta discussion could go.

As you point out, MeTas have been made before. To paraphrase the mods’ policy statement, Metafilter contains multitudes, and people can post mystery meat if they want.

My take is that people can also ask hey, what’s in this can?- if the poster wants to maintain the possibility of surprise and spontaneity, or believes that the subject is well known enough that explanation isn’t required, at least the time wasting is more evenly distributed.
posted by zamboni at 8:12 AM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

Stealing from books, documentaries, goddamn Wikipedia and one of your fucking (now ex-)fans that even subbed to your Patreon has got to be a shocking new low.
posted by Pachylad at 8:32 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Four hours is a pretty long time.

Yeah, that's too long for me. But there's a TOC under the video. You could skip to the conclusion and see if it sounds like something you want to go back and watch.
posted by pracowity at 8:32 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I watched it all over the course of today. It's a very good, thorough examination of several notable Youtubers who are known plagiarists plus a lot of new information that hasn't previously been made public.

As said above, if that's not your bag then kindly skip the post. It's not the first time a Hbomb MeFi post has been derailed like this. We don't do it with Dan Olson, so what gives?

Anyway, if you are short on time you can skip to the conclusion, which is well thought out and very relevant with regards to AI.

Please drop the derail now?
posted by Acey at 8:40 AM on December 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response

Please, please tell me it's not actually a measured response.
posted by chavenet at 8:44 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

A minor derail, but possibly a useful one. Two tools to help condense long Youtube videos.

summarize.tech supposedly "uses AI" to give you a quick gist of a video. It works nearly instantly, leading me to assume it doesn't work on the video itself at all but a transcript. Here's it's output for this video. Disclaimer: I haven't watched the video yet, so I don't know if this is accurate. I pointed it a couple of days ago at a playthrough video of an old arcade game I had uploaded and its response was padded, like a freshman writer's essay would be padded, and frequently wrong, but then I admit the video didn't give it much to work with, so YMMV.

Second, often Youtube videos have transcript links now, at the bottom of the Description box (you have to click Show More to make it visible). I don't think it's too useful with this one though.

I remember a time, years ago, when these terse kinds of post was a lot more common, and I was annoyed with the tendency back then, enough so that once I posted a long essay in MetaTalk offering my own advice on giving readers a foothold on whether the links in a post would be worth their time. It was, to put it mildly, not received well, heh. I guess aggregate site opinion has come around on the matter?

There definitely are reasons to keep to shorter posts, though. It's nice to not take up so much of the front page, since that's largely the limiting factor to how many recent posts one can scan through. I try to keep my own posts shorter these days, even though I almost always fail at doing this. And in this post's favor it goes mention the two most relevant facts that might cause someone to decide the link is relevant to their interests: "HBomberguy's latest video," and "plagiarism." And it warns the reader that they're in for four hours. Un-warned long videos are a bit of a pet peeve of mine, enough so that these days I always include lengths when I post vids.

Anyway, I'm going into this detail because a few days ago I made a post about the cartoons made by Gooseworx. While making it, I found that one of the videos had been linked before, but it was a one short sentence post, that had received one comment total, a great shame. I'm hoping my words here might spare some other worthy posts, and subject matters, a similar fate.
posted by JHarris at 8:45 AM on December 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Not used to seeing so much grumbling about lack of detail.

I've noticed that there's generally a lot of hostility toward long(er) video essays here. Sometimes that surfaces as complaints about the genre itself (e.g. "this should just be text" or "this could have been 15 minutes"), and sometimes the post being held to higher standards - or being more harshly lambasted for not meeting whatever standards are in the complainer's mind.

I mean, it is a four-hour long video and some people won't have the time or interest to watch it. A little more context would be nice, especially for people who might not be familiar with hbomberguy's thing. But what would be phrased as a suggestion/request for more follow-up information just becomes grousing negativity and rudeness that is probably going to discourage people from posting in the future.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:46 AM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

A dogmatic requirement for lengthy prose from posters

I actually think the post itself was fine. And that the initial comments asked for more detail before making the time commitment was completely expected. In many other threads, such detail is shared by other commenters or the poster when requested. I clicked on the post because I was hoping that, as usually happens, other commenters would have provided such detail. The poster getting upset that people asked for addition context was the unusual thing in this case, that I for one was reacting to negatively.
posted by eviemath at 8:50 AM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don't know if people are hostile so much as feeling time pressured. Youtube rewards video length, since it means more opportunities to serve ads to the viewer. I love seeing new thoughtful videos, even long ones! They're nice to come back to over several days.\

And I'd just like to say, thanks Pendragon, for making it. I probably wouldn't have seen it without your link!
posted by JHarris at 8:52 AM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

I agree with folks above who say posts like this need WAY more context than what was provided. Otherwise it's literally just clickbait - something I come to MeFi to avoid. Not everybody automatically knows (I daresay not even nearly most people know) who HBomberGuy is, folks.

That said, I did succumb to this particular piece of clickbait today because I was just that bored hanging out in the kitchen doing chores, so I am now about 1 hour and 50 minutes into the video (it plays in the background and magically motivates me to finish doing the dishes!) and I am finding it thoroughly enjoyable. One of the rare instances when clickbait didn't bait-and-switch up on me! :)

Thanks for posting and please consider providing LOTS more context next time? There are occasions when it is prudent to be coy and keep the contents of your 4 hour video link a mystery. This is not one of those occasions. It would not be a spoiler and nor would it ruin any aspect of the viewing experience to describe the general contents of the video and talk about how this youtube personality creates content of substance, perhaps link to some of his old hits, etc.
posted by MiraK at 9:00 AM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

One of the first comments on this post is:

Before you want me to commit 4 hours of my life to watch something, something more than you need to watch this, is completely and utterly required. I can only presume this post was plagiarized from a longer, better post.

You characterize this as someone just "asking for more detail," which makes the original poster's response seem out of line, but when you look at what was actually said, their response seems a lot more understandable. And then the comment immediately after is just a general complaint about the video essay genre.

I too would tell someone to just move on if it's not their thing. Which more people should do.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:01 AM on December 3, 2023 [25 favorites]

Please, please tell me it's not actually a measured response.

I mean, it absolutely and positively tells you why a bunch of people can get fucked as frauds and liars while telling you the means and motives of their fraud, so yes.

(Those people can really, really get fucked. Andrew Wakefield especially.)
posted by Artw at 9:02 AM on December 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

summarize.tech supposedly "uses AI" to give you a quick gist of a video. It works nearly instantly, leading me to assume it doesn't work on the video itself at all but a transcript. Here's it's output for this video.

Kind of ironic that we’re going to AI as an excuse not to watch a video about plagiarism, industrialization of content, and the contempt for creative work inherent in that plagiarism and industrialization.
posted by Artw at 9:05 AM on December 3, 2023 [31 favorites]

This video is about James Somerton. You can tell that the video is about James Somerton because at one hour and fifty minutes in, the narrator looks straight at the camera, and with dramatic music playing says: "THIS VIDEO IS ABOUT JAMES SOMERTON." You could be forgiven for not knowing this, since if you click around to find an autogenerated transcript it does not recognize that this is a proper name or spell it correctly, even once. You are welcome or I am sorry for the spoiler, depending
posted by phooky at 9:18 AM on December 3, 2023 [16 favorites]

I mean, it absolutely and positively tells you why a bunch of people can get fucked as frauds and liars while telling you the means and motives of their fraud, so yes.

To add to this:

As an American, I was aware that the Wakefield study was bad science that was retracted; I wasn't aware of just how much of it was intentional fraud and grift until I watched hbomberguy's video. He cites a lot of events and coverage from the UK that just didn't come into my awareness, as someone who hadn't done a deep dive on Wakefield on my own. I suspect that the average UK viewer would have come to video knowing more than I did, but I found it pretty educational (as well as entertaining).
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:20 AM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

Kind of ironic that we’re going to AI as an excuse not to watch a video about plagiarism, industrialization of content, and the contempt for creative work inherent in that plagiarism and industrialization.

Not an excuse to not to see it, but a way to get more information on whether the time investment is worth it.
posted by JHarris at 9:35 AM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

As mentioned (in this video and in the actual antivax video itself) a lot of it is from Brian Deer’s work, and you could argue that the bulk of the antivax video is a repackaging of that content in a way that makes it palatable to a wider audience… which is also true of illuminaughty and might make me extend them a bit more of a pass on their poor citation habits than I would with the video game and monster movie stuff. Like, they are getting the word out there on something important, does it matter that they are basically using a bunch of high school essay tricks to do it?

Damn is the lazy version of it exposed as a lesser product when you lay it all out though.

Also It muddies the waters like crazy, because it becomes a bit less trustworthy the further it gets from source and it makes it seem like these are just unsourced opinions that have popped into her head.

Which is to say: there’s dozens of podcasts and videos that do this on interesting subjects, some of which I actually like, some of which I could see myself sharing, but I wish they’d all do a better job of it as far as cites go and maybe we should all be a bit more discerning.
posted by Artw at 9:36 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

And then I get to the Fire festival example and… yeah, that’s just lightly dressed up theft.
posted by Artw at 9:49 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's interesting to see Hbomberguy spending this much time on this topic when I think he's still involved with court cases surrounding the whole iilumaughtii meltdown from a few months ago. I'll have to watch the video.

I'm sad to hear it's about Somerton, as I enjoy his videos. But I don't think he's ever been making much of a secret that he's more writing book reports than doing any actual synthesis of ideas on his own.
posted by hippybear at 9:51 AM on December 3, 2023

For a one picture summary of the four hours, you could do worse than this sXitter post which supplies the missing attribution (from 2:22:58) for Somerton's Society and Queer Horror script. Caveat: it's only what he was able to find, not exhaustive but it's still damned damning.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:52 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you don't want to spend 4 hours watching it

I think people are asking precisely because they might want to spend 4 hours watching it. Anyone how is sure they don't, will have scrolled on by. Anyone asking needs more info to decide.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:02 AM on December 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

The bit about garbage AI summaries is at around the one hour five minutes mark, BTW.
posted by Artw at 10:03 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

He Has Only 3 Organs Left But The Scientists Turn Him Into a Super Soldier
posted by Acey at 10:06 AM on December 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't know what to say, other than, I'm enjoying the video, and if it were a a four-part docu-series on Netflix, the balking by few of you would be less. Let's all chill.

I really miss the days of well-argued essays being a written form.
me too, but youtube is arguably one of the only places these essayists can find an audience and make any money from their work.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 10:17 AM on December 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

It is good.
posted by Captaintripps at 10:24 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hbomberguy (Wikipedia)

Harris Michael Brewis[5][6] (born 19 September 1992),[7] better known as Hbomberguy, is a British YouTuber and Twitch streamer.[8] Brewis produces video essays on a variety of topics such as film, television, and video games, often combining them with arguments from left-wing political and economic positions.[9][10] He also creates videos aimed at debunking conspiracy theories and responding to right-wing and antifeminist arguments.[11]
[snip]
Brewis started the Hbomberguy YouTube channel on 28 May 2006.[12] As of 22 September 2023, the channel has over 1,260,000 subscribers.[12]
[snip]
In keeping with his focus on the importance of research, in December 2023 he released a video regarding plagiarism (including plagiarism from Wikipedia) and content mills.[15]

posted by pracowity at 10:51 AM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I, for one, am glad someone posted about the video here. I saw the new HBomb video pop up on YouTube last night and the 4 hour runtime. And even though I've liked every video of his I've seen, still balked at the runtime. I figured if it was worth watching someone would recommend it on one of the sites I frequent. And here it is! Thanks Pendragon!

And I've just gotten to the reveal and now it seems really funny that YouTube would often recommend a James Somerton video right next to another one that looked ~awfully similar~ but with seemingly a more specific focus. Going to watch the rest of the HBomb video and find out!
posted by Is It Over Yet? at 10:51 AM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

The last time I watched a super long video from an FPP was that six-hour one about a japanese dating sim and I knew that guy even less than hbomberguy but the FPP and comments gave me enough context to help me decide if I should give it a go. The difference I assume is the FPP wasn't written with the idea that of course I must know who the video essayist is and what the milieu is all about. To be frank, without getting too meta, that's generally why I do scroll on by a lot of video posts, that assumption of shared (sub)cultural fluency.

And I like hbomberguy's videos! But it's Monday morning just before 3am and timezones are a thing too, so if I had some more info, I'd remember to check back.
posted by cendawanita at 10:53 AM on December 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Fellow ADHDers: I stand before you today, proud, exhausted, exhilarated. I have done house chores for 3 hours, 51 minutes, and 10 seconds.

I'd like to thank my husband, for patiently enduring me sprinting over to yell "OMG DID YOU HEAR THAT LET ME TELL YOU" periodically all day, and my children, for patiently repeating whatever it was they'd said once I'd paused the video. And a big thanks to HBomberguy for spilling the tea for so long in such a fascinating, heartfelt, touching manner. I also want to begrudgingly thank Pendragon for being so enticingly mysterious about a nearly 4 goddamn hours long video
posted by Baethan at 11:00 AM on December 3, 2023 [31 favorites]

Excitedly passed the link to child 1 who told me they had already watched it and were an hour into rewatching the Minecraft oof sound video.
posted by Artw at 11:03 AM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Artw, I legit opened this Minecraft oof sound video and listened to it for way too many oofs while contemplating how someone could listen to that sound for a whole hour more than once

before finally noticing the Roblox oof video
posted by Baethan at 11:19 AM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'd like to thank my husband, for patiently enduring me sprinting over to yell "OMG DID YOU HEAR THAT LET ME TELL YOU" periodically all day, and my children, for patiently repeating whatever it was they'd said once I'd paused the video.

Are you telling us that you plagiarized a YouTube video to your family?
posted by hippybear at 11:24 AM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

The first comment I saw on the plagiarism video was “thank you, Tommy Tallarico, for creating this 4-hour long video about plagiarism.”
posted by Artw at 11:24 AM on December 3, 2023 [17 favorites]

This video is interesting, even though I’ve never seen any of the people it’s talking about I’m skipping around a bit, but I’m still watching a pretty good chunk of it. I think it probably needs to be as long as it is to be irrefutable, even if I don’t want to watch every second of it.

Can anybody add some context to the part where he rips down the wallpaper behind him to reveal that it’s real and not greenscreen? It seemed like it was alluding to some kind of trope.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:27 AM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Used to be, you could just post a link to MetaFilter without writing an entire essay. Alas, those days are gone.

To me, the posts with ten million links are the most iconic of posts (though I usually just post links to videos nowadays). All of the other link blogs are built around single links to content. Metafilter is the one that lets you go long.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:48 AM on December 3, 2023

This video is about James Somerton

I am so very not online anymore.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM on December 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

Interestingly, Man In Cave was an FPP here back in 2022.
posted by hippybear at 12:00 PM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Interestingly, Man In Cave was an FPP here back in 2022.

At least the post credits the Mental Floss article!
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:31 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Can anybody add some context to the part where he rips down the wallpaper behind him to reveal that it’s real and not greenscreen? It seemed like it was alluding to some kind of trope.

He was saying that he bets viewers are expecting this to be the part of the video where it is revealed his background is a greenscreen while revealing what the video is really about because he's done that a few times
posted by jason_steakums at 12:39 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have been around since 2006 and I am very hard pressed to remember a time where someone posted a four hour video with almost no context and wasn't asked to expand their description.

I've been around since 2000-ish, and I can guarantee that time never existed on this website. People shitting their pants in anger when someone points out their links/comments/whatever aren't as inherently interesting as the poster would like to believe? That probably happened on the first day lol.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:47 PM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's a little ironic that video game reviews are used as an example when video games themselves are quite often copy pasta'd.
posted by alex_skazat at 12:50 PM on December 3, 2023

Oh goodness gracious. This is SUCH a takedown of Somerton... Like, it's beyond yikes.

Too bad, I enjoy what he chose to present. I don't think we'll be seeing anything new from him again.

Interestingly, when Iiluminaughtii was just starting to be brought down, she dumped out something like a month's worth of videos in just a week, like she knew things would soon be ending for her.
posted by hippybear at 12:57 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm also a little confused why someone would produce a 4 hour Youtube video but not check that they're talking head shots were in focus.
posted by alex_skazat at 1:02 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't normally watch these things as I'm not at all familiar with any YouTubers or any of the subgenres, fandom, personalities, or controversies. Based on just a little more context from a couple of comments, I chose to watch it this morning while doing my usual puttering about the house, on 1.5-2x because 4 hours. It was really, really well done! I would 100% audit this professor's course. My only criticism is the bit about AI seemed to be a bit smashed onto the end, and I think that could warrant a bit more explanation. I'd have been happy with less curb stomping of a couple of individuals and a little more exploration of the broader implications. Not that he didn't do the latter well, just more of a minor critique on percentage of content in the presentation.
posted by blendor at 1:35 PM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m with Going to Maine: who is this James Somerton character?

I kid. Sort of. Thanks to the additional context provided in the various comments above, I now know that, although plagiarism is an issue I am concerned with in some respects, this video seems to be focusing on plagiarism within specific YouTube communities that I have no connection with, getting into nitty gritty details about who did what when and similar insider baseball, and thus is not something I want to spend four hours on, even though there could be other long YouTube videos on a different sub-topic within the broad category of plagiarism that would interest me. Eg. something giving a history of conceptions of intellectual labor and attribution and relating that to current-day academia or modern conceptions of what constitutes plagiarism would be highly relevant and interesting to me, as would something discussing ways current technology or structural/capitalist incentives either promote or mitigate against the practice of plagiarism. But I don’t need to know all about specific instances of plagiarism within a community that I think it is lovely that some of the rest of you care about but that I don’t have a personal connection to.

Sometimes an extra long video might start out with a specific instance that I don’t have sufficient connection to to care about the details of, but expand into the areas that do interest me. I can skim ahead in a written article article to check for stuff like that, but I can’t do the same with a video. Thus without the context provided by you all, I might start the video and abandon it, never knowing that about it, or I might have the frustrating experience of spending scarce time on something that turned out not to be worthwhile for me (note to forestall fighty argument: worthwhile for me is entirely personal, and doesn’t imply anything about worthwhile for anyone else). I appreciate when Metafilter enables me to avoid missing things that I would appreciate, but also provides this “skimming” feature for videos so that I can better assess which links fall into that category.
posted by eviemath at 1:35 PM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

I too had no previous idea who James Somerton is, and the video remains of interest and a thing I would recommend watching.
posted by Artw at 1:41 PM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

For anyone who would like a text summary, there is an AI summarizer at summarize.tech which summarizes each hour, and you can click See More for each hour to get a summary for each five minutes. Here is the summarize.tech summary for Plagiarism and You(Tube).
posted by kristi at 1:41 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Also: to abuse an internet trope that I generally find annoying: some of you all have not been asked thousands of times “is this going to be on the test?” and “when will I ever use this in real life?”, or regularly read think pieces or quotes from politicians or just comments on online forums about how educators in your area need to make the content interesting and relevant to students constantly and not expect them to have some patience that a body of knowledge will get built up over time and come together in an enlightening and useful way, or dealt with student evaluation comments, or dealt with administrators and politicians wanting you to justify your discipline convincingly for a general audience who have significant misconceptions about it but preferably in a single short paragraph, and it shows.)
posted by eviemath at 1:46 PM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

One deleted, please don't moderate threads or tell users how to participate, use the flag tool or email us! Major derail left up, but let's get the thread back on track and drop the derail. Keep your comments focused on what OP had intended the post to be about moving forward.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 2:00 PM on December 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

Im all for eviemath’s comment for a general defense of long form content.

I too am also skeptical of long YouTube videos. But I have watched several of them only because folks on metafiler (generally, not uniformly) recommended them. I’ve been holding out on this one because usually if the post doesn’t provide a hook a comment in the thread might.
posted by zenon at 2:01 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’m quite vocal about long videos, and I usually wish videos were shorter.

In this case, it helps to be somewhat familiar with hbomberguy and his past work, because, well, you’re going to get a lot of it, and he’s not to everyone’s taste.

However, from my vantage point 2 hours in, I’m not sure the video could be that much shorter, since he’s making claims that could be defamatory if not true, and he needs to be thorough. Additionally, he makes solid use of the video’s ability to show the plagiarized text while the plagiarizing audio plays. It’s a good use of the medium.

I do wish he wouldn’t wear that “comically” ratty cost, though. I find it distracting.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:27 PM on December 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I'm glad I got to the end. Lots of thoughtful things in this video, but wow, poor James.

He put up a video about a year ago that was very short called "an announcement" and it felt unusual to me so I watched it. The video was maybe 3 minutes and it was basically saying "so we aren't bringing in as much money as we used to, and you people better step up or we'll stop making videos 'cause we'll need to get real jobs."

And my initial thought was "wow, you're a bitchy queen" and my second thought was "why didn't you make this video and remind people to check for expired credit cards on your patreon, because that's likely what is going on".

But bitchy queen appears to be the actual definition should have stuck with.

Anyway, truly did enjoy James' work. Sorry to see this is how that is.
posted by hippybear at 2:30 PM on December 3, 2023

that “comically” ratty coat
Avoid the Slow Mo Guys, so?
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:04 PM on December 3, 2023

I haven't had time to watch yet, but I will do. I'm not sure how it'll go for me, I've been a patron of Sommerton for a while and always enjoyed his videos.

He's deleted his patreon now, or turned off the part where he can get money from people. I'm not surprised, the criticism is harsh and deeply personal.
I am slightly confused by the references to plagiarism from a few books since I understood that he had approv from the authors to use their materials on YouTube.

It sounds like there's more to it, which is a pity. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.
posted by Braeburn at 3:35 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm an hour in while multitasking and it's sort of piping hot tea.
posted by Selena777 at 3:53 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

ONE MEFITE'S DATA POINT

I kind of get the original complaint about not enough context for the recommendation. Four hours is a long time for most people; it's some kind of threshold, as Scorsese's latest movie seems to have demonstrated.

BUT

I used to think the same thing about YT videos over two hours long, and Line Goes Up rid me of that; friends, I've watched it twice, and regularly recommend it to others who want to know more about crypto and NFTs. If Dan Olson could do it (and he's also done other worthy long-form videos about the Metaverse and the GameStop cult), others could do it, too.

AND FOR THAT MATTER

I myself have written thousands of words about individual Star Trek episodes.

PLUS

I've heard good things about this hbomberguy.

SO

I think I'll watch this video.

HOWEVER

A little context in the FPP doesn't hurt. Some of us don't just listen to these things while we're doing other stuff; some of us, for whatever personal or neurospicy reason, basically can't. If it's really good (and, from what others have said, it seems to be), you can sell it a little. Doesn't hurt.

IN CONCLUSION

The blue is a land of contrasts.

P.S.

Chunking the content also helps much.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:14 PM on December 3, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm enjoying this so far.

I often find very long YouTube videos unnecessary where I feel like the writing ought to be more concise, the video format doesn't add anything, etc.

But this one is not like that. It's incredibly dense with source material and visuals that couldn't possibly be replicated as a text essay. Not for everyone, but it's an example of where the video essay format works.
posted by lookoutbelow at 4:16 PM on December 3, 2023 [10 favorites]

I am slightly confused by the references to plagiarism from a few books since I understood that he had approv from the authors to use their materials on YouTube.

I will let you watch yourself rather than paraphrasing, but the video will clear up the confusion.
posted by St. Sorryass at 4:26 PM on December 3, 2023 [18 favorites]

I'm an academic. I'm very familiar with plagiarism, having been a classroom professor for years. And my field of study is academia (specifically, academic's future). So I am already primed for this.

But I don't know hbomberguy. I don't know James Somerton. And like many academics I am *enormously* beyond busy right now, in December, when a semester is careening to an end and the new semester is coming up fast.

Thanks to some comments, I'll give this a try. But it'll probably take days, maybe more.
posted by doctornemo at 4:26 PM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Given how methodically it points out several very different examples of plagiarism that are entirely unrelated to each other (other than being on YouTube) I'm not really sure it could have been shorter unless it just focused on a single person. If you're looking to break it up I think it naturally separates into 2 or 3 videos that you could watch in sessions if you don't have time to do it all at once.

I think the video was worth the nearly 4 hour runtime, even though I only knew of one of the YouTubers he mentioned in the video. I should say that (a) I'm in COVID isolation right now and hurting for things to watch and (b) I'm a preexisting casual hbomberguy fan. But I for one appreciated the post.
posted by malthas at 4:37 PM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Having reached the end, I think the length is justified, and it doesn’t feel as long as it is (for people who worry about their endurance). You could easily watch it in 3 parts: 1 hr, 1 hr, and the remainder, as long as you did it in a relatively short period to keep the overarching themes in place.

I also like that he ends by identifying a slew of queer creators whose work he supports who work in the same field as Somerton but more ethically, including some who Somerton plagiarized.

As a MetaFilter callback, he references the work of Jes Tom, who did the video featured in this FPP.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:01 PM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I also like that he ends by identifying a slew of queer creators whose work he supports who work in the same field as Somerton but more ethically, including some who Somerton plagiarized.

Yes, I need to watch that part again to get more names, but several are in there I'm already aware of and keep an eye out for, and there were more I want to check out.

That felt like the cherry on the top of the whole thing for a long-form video watcher like myself who did like Somerton until all this came out.

Maybe someone else will transcribe that list of names before I get to it, but I will get to it before I go to bed tonight.
posted by hippybear at 5:06 PM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hbomberguy's producer, Kat, put together a YouTube playlist for the queer creators recommended in the conclusion to the video.
posted by Jeanne at 5:09 PM on December 3, 2023 [25 favorites]

So glad to see Matt Baume recommended, he's so good. His back-to-back Angela Lansbury, Leslie Jordan and Kevin Conroy videos after they passed were such good send-offs. And on the sillier end of the spectrum, his video on Hollywood Montrose from Mannequin is just a delight. Also worth mentioning, the one about shipping Garak and Bashir and the one about The Birdcage and La Cage aux Folles
posted by jason_steakums at 5:31 PM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

Wiki on HBomberguy
posted by Ideefixe at 5:40 PM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

me: "wow, 80 comments already"

I click in to discover that roughly 70 of them are about the framing of the post

ah, getting that Authentic MetaFilter Experience
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:21 PM on December 3, 2023 [43 favorites]

I've watched the bulk of this, and only stopped when he started mentioning queer YouTubers he'd recommend, so that I could track them down and subscribe to them (thanks to Jeanne above for linking the playlist, which'll be much quicker & easier).

It is a long video, but dense and extremely convincing, and I wish I'd seen it earlier. I don't want to derail the thread, but it became clear to me that I've plagiarized the bulk of the book/TV/movie descriptions I've posted on Fanfare--the system pulls in the film descriptions from IMDb and I've left them there without explicitly citing the source (the link in the sidebar doesn't count), or actively replaced them with longer summaries from JustWatch, or stripped out bits I felt said too much, or rewritten parts that seemed weak, or copied book summaries in from Goodreads, etc.--and all of this is plagiarism.

At any rate, I should have known (& thought about) all this in re: Fanfare before, so I found this video illuminating even in a general/theoretical sense which (for me) it shouldn't have been. So thanks for posting it.
posted by johnofjack at 6:21 PM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yeah honestly the video is long but it's also extremely watchable, both from an entertainment point of view and from an academic rigor point of view. It does help to be willing to watch it in bits and pieces, a half-hour here, an hour there.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:23 PM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh. Just continued the video, and the playlist is linked in the description. Well, thanks for linking it here again. :-)
posted by johnofjack at 6:31 PM on December 3, 2023

I am slightly confused by the references to plagiarism from a few books since I understood that he had approv from the authors to use their materials on YouTube.

I will let you watch yourself rather than paraphrasing, but the video will clear up the confusion.

The video explains this at length, but one big thing is that he only reluctantly admits that he's based his videos on books after people notice, and then sticks in a brief acknowledgement that he did. But until that point he didn't even mention his source, not even to point his viewers at it for their own edification, because if he did, he'd get people coming back and saying "Wait, you didn't just base it on this, you copied it! Verbatim!" Because he didn't just base them on books, he yoinks whole passages, uncredited.

Anyway, hbomberguy is probably the only youtuber who can keep me engaged for a four hour video essay about something I only have passing familiarity with and very few prior opinions on. He's even better on stuff I do have prior opinions on- his Sherlock video is pretty much a masterpiece. He's very good at this.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:37 PM on December 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

I probably owe hbom easily four hours of my life just based on how many times I have suddenly muttered “to who, Ben? FUCKING AQUAMAN?” to myself and laughed. Sooooo many times over the years.
posted by phearlez at 7:42 PM on December 3, 2023 [27 favorites]

Harris makes some of the most insightful videos on YouTube. This gem from the middle of a video about CTRL-ALT-DEL where it veers into a discussion about The Room is one of my favourite moments ever from the entire site. I can almost forgive the whole of, you know, everything else, just because it enabled this.

"The Room, precisely with its unrealistic, biased inaccuracy, accurately depicts why breakups actually happen; people don't fully understand how the other person feels and begin to think of them as malicious figures, because that's the only way we can make sense of people when we don't fully understand them. I've talked to plenty of guys about breakups, and very often you get the same old story just like this one, where their partner turned out to be a crazy bitch who just wanted to hurt them. But if you're ever lucky enough to hear the other side of a story like that, they're often just frustrated with people who can so easily view them like that if they have a few arguments. Wiseau tried to make a film about his breakup, but it turned out to be a film about his inability to understand why it happened." -- CTRL+ALT+DEL | SLA:3, hbomberguy

He has a way of seeing non-obvious motivation in a way that makes you think "why did I never notice this before?". I'm about 90 minutes into this latest one and it's pretty decent so far. I will find time to finish it.
posted by krisjohn at 8:00 PM on December 3, 2023 [17 favorites]

HBomberguy could put out an 8 hour video on, I don't know, bowling pins and I'm in. I started this last night and am finishing it tonight.
posted by axiom at 8:17 PM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

HOLY SHIT THERE'S NOW A SECOND CALLOUT VIDEO:

I fact-checked the Worst Video Essayist on Youtube

Todd in the Shadows focusing on his bullshit (as in, straight up fabrications) rather than his plagiarism this time.
posted by Pachylad at 8:27 PM on December 3, 2023 [21 favorites]

Okay, so, wow. Todd has nothing in this, there is no coin he has in this game. Todd does music reviewing.

That Todd In The Shadows feels the need to put any say into this is... stunning.
posted by hippybear at 8:33 PM on December 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

(Ah, The Room: the entirely accidentally accurate portrayal of how a woman’s emotionally abusive parent primed her to accept emotionally abusive relationships with men.)
posted by eviemath at 8:37 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, that Todd In The Shadows video is 1h42m long.

Just so you know ahead of time.

[Honestly, this is why I've made it a policy for myself when I'm posting ANY video, either as a comment or an FPP, to include the length of the video as part of what I'm writing. Unless it's, like, a song where it can be assumed to be short. I wish more MeFi posters would make it that policy, because while this FPP told you up front how long the video was, there are a lot where it's an utter shock.]
posted by hippybear at 8:37 PM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

lol nvrmnd everyone beat me to Todd's video.
posted by alex_skazat at 8:51 PM on December 3, 2023

I kinda hope this just keeps going and we get like Contrapoints and Jenny Nicholson and Philosophy Tube and others just doling out a takedown a day for a while
posted by jason_steakums at 9:01 PM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

That was a good video. (As a random aside, I think hbomberguy looks and speaks a lot like the dude behind crimson custom guitars, minus the head tattoo.)

I wish I understood more about "fans" and how they so quickly get so deeply invested in people or groups they really know nothing about, to the point that they'll bring violence to anyone criticizing their thing. The existence of plagiarizing turds is bad enough, but it's made 100x worse by the crowds that gather round them.
posted by maxwelton at 9:03 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been around since 2000-ish, and I can guarantee that time never existed on this website. People shitting their pants in anger when someone points out their links/comments/whatever aren't as inherently interesting as the poster would like to believe? That probably happened on the first day lol.

Mathowie didn't even explain what a scanner was.
posted by srboisvert at 9:07 PM on December 3, 2023 [22 favorites]

looks and speaks a lot like the dude behind crimson custom guitars, minus the head tattoo

that dude gives me bad vibes
posted by awfurby at 9:09 PM on December 3, 2023

In fact, quite a bit of the point of this video, alongside calling out plagiarism in various forms, is pointing out that there's an entire industry of people making truly lazy YouTube videos which may or may not be plagiarized but which are really dull to watch and nobody likes them and it stains the entire platform.

Probably a completely different niche and a slight derail but I've had to block a bunch of different YouTube channels (Do Not Recommend this Channel) every week because they were just pirated sports highlight content. I watch F1, NFL, Premier League and Champions League highlights and all of them get ripped reposted by garbage channels in lower resolutions without audio or with weird cooking videos tacked onto the end. Then YouTube recommends them to me before the actual source videos! Youtube plagiarism is so weird and vast.
posted by srboisvert at 9:17 PM on December 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Mathowie didn't even explain what a scanner was.

When I later saw the film, I was horrified and wondered why he even wanted to post about cats being wedged into this awfulness.
posted by hippybear at 9:22 PM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Youtube plagiarism is so weird and vast.

I cannot count the times I've seen the same original clip: weirdly cropped; with some odd filter over the top; or most commonly horizontally flipped. I mean how much actual money is there in this? Or maybe it's so easy to do and shit out that the $0.57 you'll make still makes it worth it?
posted by maxwelton at 9:23 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

this video essay is about a queer guy who has figured out a great business hack to make way more money than you do in a month by simply ripping off some queer people to quickly produce videos for other queer people

if you're not queer this concept is not particularly interesting or all that devastating which is partially why a large amount of the essay is dedicated to setting up the topic of plagiarism on youtube

if you are queer and spend a bit of time on youtube you probably know this james somerton guy and you may have felt happy to have some queer history bones tossed your way since that's not like easy stuff to just run into and maybe even you gave this guy money for that and might feel pretty deeply about this

if you're part of that second group you feel pretty bad because this guy takes the actual history bits from other queer people and presents it as his own, doesn't credit anything in a useful way so you'd never be able to actually look into it yourself and the people in your community who worked hard on it are erased, and sometimes he makes stuff up wholesale while intentionally banking on his audience never questioning it because queer history is an inherently niche interest and he's the loudest voice in the market

so it's like personally disgusting to a lot of people that care about queer history, including hbomberguy, which is why we have a video essay that has to be 4 hours to try to explain how much it sucks we have to suffer this situation where a queer person has been incentivized to scam other queers because no one important cares and there's really nothing to stop that besides anyway besides making a 4 hour video essay about it i guess
posted by grizzly at 9:37 PM on December 3, 2023 [34 favorites]

It should also be mentioned that, in the video, HBomb says he's going to take any money he gets from this video and split it among the authors he knows Somerton plagiarized. He didn't want to make money from this, and he wants to see their good work rewarded.
posted by meese at 9:49 PM on December 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

Interestingly, Man In Cave was an FPP here back in 2022.

The YouTube link in that post appears to be copyright-struck, unfortunately.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:02 PM on December 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The YouTube link in that post appears to be copyright-struck, unfortunately.

Gosh, I wonder why that is....
posted by Pendragon at 10:14 PM on December 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

The YouTube link in that post appears to be copyright-struck, unfortunately.

struck by the parent company of the publisher of the article it plagiarized, yeah
posted by BungaDunga at 10:16 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

So, I watched about 45 minutes of this video this evening (before I’d saw this thread). It is *fascinating*. Totally riveting, and I don’t know any of these YouTubers. The way he is presenting the blatant rip-offs that the YouTubers did is really interesting and compelling. I don’t know about the end (I don’t have four hours in one go, but conveniently the video is in parts!), nor do I know who James Somerton is. But I’ll watch the rest of the video!
posted by leahwrenn at 11:00 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

One removed. At this point, if people want to continue the extended meta conversation on more vs less description in posts, probably best to go to Metatalk to do it again.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:05 AM on December 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think Harris (Hbomberguy) is in a uniquely good position to make this video--he is also queer and has a larger YouTube presence than Somerton, and as such is less vulnerable to attacks alleging that he's too jealous or straight to comment.

Todd In the Shadows (usually a music channel) has posted something of a companion piece to this one, where he fact checks more than 30 claims made by Somerton in his videos. He also has a short, special section on the "intuition" based "research" that Somerton's co-writer copped to in their now deleted Discord server.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 1:32 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

That Todd in the Shadows video was posted earlier in the thread.
posted by Pendragon at 1:43 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

If nothing else this video brilliantly calls falling victim to the Streisand Effect a "Streisandian bargain" which is a pretty clever turn of phrase.
posted by St. Oops at 4:06 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I will also say that I watched about the first half of the CTRL-ALT-DEL video last night as a sort of shorter-form introduction to hbomberguy, and I'm really digging it; gets to the heart of why I bounced off that webcomic even during the period when I was following a lot more webcomics than I do today.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:41 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I strongly recommend Todd in the Shadow's video. Debunking nonsense might even be more important than calling out plagiarism.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:03 AM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Todd video feels so out of character to him, and apparently this takedown has been in process and coordinated between at least HBomber and Todd since the Springtime? Are there other videos going to drop demolishing other facets of Somerton's career?
posted by hippybear at 6:08 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

One reason that these videos are so long is that it takes a lot of time to lay out the evidence clearly. It also takes a lot of work (although much less than it might have if the plagiarizers had tried harder), which is bitterly ironic since the thieves spent almost no time and made all the money, while the debunkers took a lot of time to make little or none.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:28 AM on December 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have a friend whose play was yoinked-with-not-much-of-a-twist and turned into a mystery miniseries by a big production company, and sold to a bunch of TV stations all over the world. My friend sued but had to give up because the legal process was too expensive, so that beginning clip about how Harris Brewis couldn't find a more recent example than one from the 70s felt very ooph. Ooph.

One thing that my friend had to spend a lot of time doing was explaining to people what plagiarism is, because people essentially just think it's "quoting without attribution", so I'm glad there's a long video like this that has explained to millions of people that it's more complicated than that.

I'd never watched a video essay by Brewis before, but I found it really well done, and worth my time (with the caveat that I'm laid up in bed with Covid so my time isn't exactly precious right now).
posted by Kattullus at 7:06 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

The section leading up to his saying he was going to donate the proceeds, about coopting other queer peoples work and rrasing their contributions, was very affecting.

His other work is great. His analysis of BBC's Sherlock is very entertaining, and his work about the games Pathologic and Dark Souls is also engrossing. I play computer games, so I can't guarantee non gamers will find them as interesting, but if you liked his style you might try them.
posted by Gorgik at 7:24 AM on December 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also that time he dressed up in the world's saddest homemade Sonic costume is 😙👌
posted by jason_steakums at 7:33 AM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Honestly, the chapter labelled “HE'S STILL DOING IT”, where in a split-screen shot Brewis literally highlights what Somerton is reading directly from Wikipedia made me laugh out loud.

grizzly: “if you're part of that second group you feel pretty bad because this guy takes the actual history bits from other queer people and presents it as his own, doesn't credit anything in a useful way so you'd never be able to actually look into it yourself and the people in your community who worked hard on it are erased, and sometimes he makes stuff up wholesale while intentionally banking on his audience never questioning it because queer history is an inherently niche interest and he's the loudest voice in the market”

This is what really hurt my feelings. I have posted his videos in places; hell, maybe even here. I have gotten choked up watching his videos. To find out it was all bullshit is really hurtful.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:55 AM on December 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

This is what really hurt my feelings. I have posted his videos in places; hell, maybe even here. I have gotten choked up watching his videos. To find out it was all bullshit is really hurtful.

I've been through the full five stages of grief about Somerton just since this thread was posted, beginning with my early comment about Somerton doing glorified book reports as my Denial phase.

Really, the Todd In The Shadows video is maybe even more damning, because at least when Somerton is plagiarizing he's quoting actual facts that someone else has researched. Todd lays out ninety minutes of straight up fact checking showing that Somerton is a full-on fabricator of facts. And draws out some pretty creepy things about Somerton's attitudes toward women and body image in the process.

I thought it was just more YouTube drama, but wow, it's a full on removal from the public sphere of someone who is actively toxic and bad for the community and YouTube in general.
posted by hippybear at 8:03 AM on December 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

I wonder if anyone will try to sue these assholes for the profits the videos generated. I'd love at the very least to see what sort of money these brought in for the plagiarists.
posted by Ferreous at 8:17 AM on December 4, 2023

While we're recommending Hbomberguy videos, I quite liked Halcyon Dreams: The Legacy Of Dragon's Lair. It's a 43 minute long documentary about the Halcyon, a laserdisc gaming system that never quite made it off the ground.
posted by gc at 8:31 AM on December 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ok, I watched it. That was really interesting. I went on Somerton's youtube page to see if he had responded, but I don't see anything. I did not watch any of his other videos because A) Movies are not my thing anyway and B) I didn't want him to get any money because of me. But it's a shame because I really want to click a random spot on one of those no-plagiarism-found-yet videos and google the words. But I won't.

Favourite moments: When he rips down the non-green-screen and the screengrab of the video-editing screen.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:32 AM on December 4, 2023

I spent most of yesterday afternoon watching the video, off and on (nap, snack, watch an hour, repeat) and I'm very glad I did so. The format of defining plagiarism and showing examples, first in game reviews then incorporating video editing then full on story telling, was a great build. This is a complex topic especially with all the layers of revenue streams involved, making the point that youtube videos aren't just, you know, goofy cat compilations from tiktok.
I watch a fair few youtubers, some of whom he highlights at the end yay!; and I know I've seen a James Somerton video and an illuminaughtti video, trying to remember which ones. Because something didn't stick for me; in Somerton's case there is something very dull in his delivery, there is a tone of voice that throws me off the subject. I'm not saying I could "feel" something was off (i.e., plagiarism/falsehood) but they didn't stimulate my learning process. In the illuminaughtti video, it was mildly interesting but I do remember words being mispronounced which stops the whole thing for me; especially when they've got the words right there on the screen? Again, I didn't learn anything so, nope.
My sympathies to everyone who looked to Somerton as a leading light in the queer youtube space, and the truth that he was stealing from other queer voices is just extra ick. So extra glad I watched this, I'll be looking at the recommended creators as well, and extra thanks to hbomberguy for putting the enormous effort into this and sharing with all the folks who were ripped off.
posted by winesong at 8:52 AM on December 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

If a 4-hour video on plagiarism on YouTube hasn't left you exhausted, and 2 hours of Todd in the Shadows looking at a slightly different angle, here's under two hours of Lady Emily looking at the wider situation around Cinemassacre, of which the plagiarism is only a part. Lady Emily is one of the YouTubers who hbomberguy listed at the end, and a frequent collaborator with Sarah Z, who has shown up on the Blue before. Anyway, Why People Are Mad about AVGN
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:55 AM on December 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

I had seen one or two illuminaughti videos and there was a real "someone reading text of a language they don't speak" energy to them. The cadence and delivery felt so weird and stilted, guess I know why now!
posted by Ferreous at 8:56 AM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, Somerton deleted his twitter. So I guess there has been some reaction.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:02 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

A great thing about HBomberguy and this video in particular is that he ends up showing by example what it's like to watch somebody who actually understands and has researched the content being delivered. It's not even the point of the video, but just by his nature he ends up providing a contrast here.

Somerton and Illuminaughti, who I hadn't been familiar with before this video, really DO sound like students reading book reports poorly (at least in the examples displayed) - there's also a vibe I can't quite place, but it sounds like almost an ego thing? Like 'I am an important person educating you with my worthwhile content' - a drab, haughty, matter-of-fact tone - basically, something I would dislike from a teacher/professor, as well.
posted by destructive cactus at 9:19 AM on December 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

He's also deactivated his patreon.

Anyways I've watched it now and overall I feel pretty upset and disappointed. I know most of the other creators already, and give some of them money, so I've subscribed to others and I guess I'll adjust my patreon so they get cash instead.
posted by Braeburn at 9:19 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've enjoyed HBomberguy and I continue to enjoy HBomberguy and this was 4 hours well spent

Thanks for posting, Pendragon. The lack of context didn't bother me a whit.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:33 AM on December 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

I feel a little strange in my response to the Somerton stuff because, well, I never really watched him. I was certainly aware of him; his videos were showing up in my algorithmic recommendations all the time. Years ago, I watched one of his videos and just found it... bland? Not to my taste, in any case. So every time I would see one of his videos come up, I would mentally tag it as "not my thing". But it certainly looked like he was talking about interesting and important things, so I would always have a thought that I should give him another try, just not right now. And so now, this isn't exactly a loss for me? I can just cross off that item from my "someday" list. But his videos were certainly a fixture of my recommendations, and I could always be happy that there was enough diversity in queer YouTube that some of it could be just not to my taste.
posted by eruonna at 9:35 AM on December 4, 2023

As a writer by trade, I've discussed with other writers how it's basically our worst nightmare to find out later to have accidentally borrowed even a single turn of phrase from research materials. To watch these people audaciously read for hours verbatim from others' original work, claim it as their own, and clumsily try to cover their tracks, knowing they've faced very little in terms of actual consequences even once caught, is mind-boggling. And a little second-hand embarrassing, too, even though if they have no shame, why should I have any on their behalf? I can't help it. Worst nightmare.

Research and writing isn't easy, (it's also not THAT hard), it doesn't pay amazing, but being able to sleep at night is priceless.
posted by lampoil at 9:45 AM on December 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh, Somerton deleted his twitter. So I guess there has been some reaction.

Somerton didn't just delete his Twitter, he deleted it within 3 hours of the video's upload.
posted by Pachylad at 9:45 AM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I used to like Illuminaughti, but maybe a year or two ago, she went from being interesting about scams to spending about half the time explaining that bad behavior was bad. I don't know whether that's a tell that something is going wrong.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:48 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm only about 2/3 of the way through this video (watching in short bursts since yesterday), but so far it is all very familiar on a personal level. Years ago I discovered that a podcaster (Dave Anthony of The Dollop) was plagiarizing huge swaths of my work, word-for-word. Thousands of words. It was even discussed here on Metafilter.

I created a blog post highlighting the extensive similarities. The author denied wrongdoing, blaming his writers. When it came out that he was the sole "writer" for the show, he pivoted to "you can't copyright nonfiction," but also "it is Fair Use." Then he said he just forgot to cite the source. He later claimed (without ever providing evidence) that some of my followers made death threats against him and his family.

I don't know how this parallel story will shake out, but I do know that Dave Anthony is still hugely successful (earning $10k+ on Patreon monthly), with no apparent consequences—apart from having to take down a bunch of old episodes, and stop plagiarizing my work. He claims he apologized for the affair, but the only apology was to say 'sorry I forgot to cite my sources.' Oh, and he's been caught plagiarizing other authors since then, according to Wikipedia. Oh, brother.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:52 AM on December 4, 2023 [34 favorites]

As an amusing (?) aside, Anthony later tried to call me out for copyright violation because I was hosting his copyrighted content on my server. He was referring to the audio files I had embedded in my blog post, wherein he reads my articles at length.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:56 AM on December 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

I think that's part of why this double-barreled blast at Somerton feels important and effective. I'd be very surprised if he has any of his YouTube career left after this because it is SO complete, SO definitive, SO absolute with what it proves.

Maybe if that Dave Anthony had gotten this treatment he'd be in another line of employment now.
posted by hippybear at 10:00 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe if that Dave Anthony had gotten this treatment he'd be in another line of employment now.

You may be right. At the time I was distraught, and trying not to overreact. It may have caused me to do the opposite. And/or my written text version just wasn't as potent as a video can be.

Anyway, sorry, I wasn't trying to derail. I just find the similarities uncanny, right down to claiming receipt of death threats.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:12 AM on December 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

The Dollop’s format is “two dumbass comedians read a historical story and improvise jokes about it” so I have to say I wasn’t terribly shocked when it came out that they were reading somebody else’s treatment of the story. But given that it’s baffling how badly Dave blew the opportunity to pass it off as an honest mistake. He had to be dragged into citing his sources on a separate web site (by you) and only after people called him out again did he start citing sources on the episode. You read like ten minutes of ads, asshole, you can spend 30 seconds mentioning that the whole thing is based on a book!
posted by atoxyl at 10:46 AM on December 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

When I later saw the film, I was horrified

OK, how come I knew that was a Canadian film? I had the sound off, so it wasn't about accents. Was it the clothes? The hair? Wait, it's the guy from Seeing Things!

* head explodes *
posted by pracowity at 10:57 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've been watching the surrounding fall out since finishing the video. Screenshots exist on twitter and reddit for verification where James Somerton has taken down or removed his presence within hours, from twitter to his Patreon, but his videos remain viewable on youtube, without comments, where people have continued checking them for plagiarism, and he can presumably still earn from clicks.
He has lost about 20k subscribers last I checked and the response on his Patreon from him at first was dismissive, playing the victim of a larger creator for what he stated were moot points that had been cleared up to his ultimate apology, where he says he doesn't want to say anything quickly but hopes he can earn his way back into good graces.
From what I've seen of the first Patreon responses who had seen the video, they were damning and horrified to be associated with plagiarism and on such a scale with their names in the credits.

Other responses have been people feeling much better about not being able to crank out worthwhile content at the suspicious rate of such plagiarists, people glad to have found other worthwhile queer creators on the growing lists from reddit, you tube and twitter all being inevitably compiled, and quite a bit of "glad to be justified in never liking them anyway."
posted by provoliminal at 11:04 AM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Dave blew the opportunity to pass it off as an honest mistake

He did succeed in convincing people that the real problem was that he neglected to cite his sources. Citing isn't enough if you're taking such a huge portion, especially if you're making buckets of money on it. I never consented, citation or not.

Regarding the video, I just got to the end. I was not previously familiar with hbomberguy, but they seem thoughtful, hilarious, and articulate, and this video is beautifully done. It was worth the lengthy time commitment, and I agree with the conclusion wholeheartedly. I feel a bit better.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 11:20 AM on December 4, 2023 [18 favorites]

Used to be that plagiarism claims were countered with "But why expose this now?" musings to recenter the discussion on the motivations of the accuser. Did that go out of fashion?
posted by Ashenmote at 12:17 PM on December 4, 2023

I enjoy hbomberman's style and thoroughness. However, I haven't seen any of the plagiarists he mentions, and I didn't feel there was any real take-away other than "wow some people are/were getting away with some brazen shit. The video did entertain me, but I was kind of hoping to get a little more out of it than that*, and I definitely regret my decision to keep watching it until the end instead of pausing and going to bed at a reasonable hour and continuing later.

* I can't think what I could have reasonably been expecting though, so maybe that's on me
posted by aubilenon at 12:37 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just to say my biases, I am an hbomberguy fan, although he's gotten this preaching from on high tone at times that is suited to bringing down the hammer in these cases, and I've seen many James Somerton videos, because, like many, I couldn't quite like the guy but he'd occasionally have a unique viewpoint or turn of phrase that made it worth having on in the background, and while I never paid enough attention to get suspicious, the plagiarism makes a hell of a lot of sense, how someone I would actively dislike at times would come up with something interesting enough to make it seem worth having on.

I really feel for the fans he duped, especially the young ones, but there's a lot of "should have known better" going on where it's very hard to spot a thing you aren't looking for, and you'd have to go through so much of his content from live streams and posts to catch how much he was admitting to being too slack to be creating work on his own. I'd leave his streams on at times to be supportive but couldn't bear to listen as he seemed like such a nincompoop but I supposed he was just much better scripted, by others at that.

It strikes me that most big time scammers go after their own communities, which is part of why it's always particularly damning, but whether it's his patrons, fans or the plagiarized, I hope the little bits of traction I've seen on twitter of people going to consult lawyers or people finding new queer creators to support gets the ball rolling in the right direction from this.

Someone mentioned I actively do like is Verity Ritchie who I highly recommend as someone who does queer content that is worth the time and damned entertaining. She's been listed as a recommendation and people suspect one of her videos was cannibalized.
posted by provoliminal at 12:43 PM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

“YouTube Plagiarism and Generation Loss,” Parker Molloy, The Present Age, 04 December 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 1:33 PM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

One wonders, if it's possible to plagiarize as blatantly and for as long as the profiled video-makers did without serious consequence, then how many other things, how much of the media that I consume, is similarly lazily stitched together Frankenstein ripoffs?

Probably more than none of it.

(Or do my extremely good taste and my keen intuitions protect me from falling for such things? Yes, surely that's it.)

How would one even attempt to measure the fraction of YouTube attention that is captured in this unethical way?
posted by Western Infidels at 2:40 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Finished. Hell's bells.

If I ever run a spelling bee and a contestant asks me to define 'comprehensive', I'll just point them at that video and take a four hour lunch break.
posted by BCMagee at 3:19 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

There’s a Reddit thread where people are making recommendations and also contributing additional plagiarisms that they find in the videos of Internet Historian and James Somerton.
posted by Kattullus at 3:28 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Running notes:

It starts with sf writers Ben Bova and Harlan Ellison (previously) and the Brillo story. Good example.

Ah, so this is about YouTube plagiarism, not the academic kind. So if it's all about video, it makes sense to make a video about it.

...at this rate it'll take me a week or two.
posted by doctornemo at 3:37 PM on December 4, 2023

Ah, so this is about YouTube plagiarism, not the academic kind

This gets more blurred toward the end of the video where Somerton takes on a co-writer for his videos who he claims IS an academic, "so of course we can't have plagiarism because that would ruin his career" as a defense. It's weirdly twisted.
posted by hippybear at 3:48 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

That reddit thread is a great way of crowdsourcing the work of combing through all the videos still up, plus it has tidbits like finding out who you didn't know was bi.

The comments on the video keep growing with people who have been victims of plagiarism and the damaging effects of it, the views have hit 3,432,395, and hbomb or hbomberguy has been trending twitter for days.

Also on reddit was a discussion on if there is legal recourse, so it will be interesting if anyone tries that angle.
posted by provoliminal at 3:54 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

A potentially confusing thing about the video is that it doesn't (as far as I noticed) define and talk about copyright infringement, fair use, and how it relates to plagiarism.

The two things can exist separately or together. But discussing copyright would help explain why you can't just say "my video is based on this" and be in the clear.

I wouldn't be surprised if he steered away from mentioning copyright since it can be murkier (less cut and dried than did/did not properly quote and cite sources), and to avoid being alleged to have defamed these folks. But I think an explicit explanation of what it is and why he's not talking about it would have helped.
posted by lookoutbelow at 5:05 PM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

He steered away from copyright because Comrade HBombergyy is a worker.

And copyright is terrible class politics.

This isn't about copyright, it s how plagiarism robs the soul from creative works, and livelihood from creative workers. It s about more than Queer politics, although it is indeed about that.

The part about Angry Video Game Nerd was about Class politics. That was probably how the video started, because Harris became a YouTuber because of AVGN and was an angry video game nerd himself. AvGN has lost his "magic" though. See plagiarism scandal.

That part of the video is exploring the devolution of AVGN from a work of love into "content"; and on the value of writers.

And then, he found a series of horrible MBA youtubers and the video became an EXPOSE

It s a video in support of the Writer s Guild, as a solidarity action.

And it s an anti -"AI" video, but not from the ruling class perspective, from a working creators' perspective.

You should dislike "AI", because the content it producers is noticeably inferior to human works.

Comrade Hbomberguy is an absolute Mensch.
posted by eustatic at 5:59 PM on December 4, 2023 [27 favorites]

He does talk about the definition of plagiarism, addressing Blair's attempt to redefine it:

"I don't think your new, special definition of plagiarism with a loophole in it is plagiarism. I think plagiarism is plagiarism and you are a plagiarist, but thank you for taking the time to respond, and good luck with all that other stuff." -- 1:23:53

(I'd link to the timecode, but YouTube is detecting my adblockers again.)

I'm not sure there's any particular requirement for a four hour video titled Plagiarism and You(Tube) to explore copyright and fair use in order to explore plagiarism, any more than there's a requirement to further explore James Somerton's utterly made up stuff or misogyny to explore plagiarism. The big diagrams that highlight the extent of Somerton's plagiarism in some individual examples, then highlight the number of Somerton's videos that have similar examples out of the entire collection are a much better use of time.
posted by krisjohn at 6:01 PM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Two copyright strikes against your channel and it's taken down. Copyright on YouTube is its own mess of false policing and malicious intent at times, which is why when something gets taken down for a copyright issue, many people don't take it seriously.

It seems inevitable James' channel will be struck, the question is who and when, unless everyone waits for some group action. If it's taken down, hopefully people have downloaded the videos for evidence before it can be erased. That's why it's weird he's left his videos up and just removed the commenting, unless it's just the hope to catch some last views before the end, ever the profit motive.
posted by provoliminal at 6:07 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, right, the main part of this video focused on copyright law is about how everyone hates copyright law, to the extent that these MBAs posing as writers win support from their audience by getting copyright struck
posted by eustatic at 6:21 PM on December 4, 2023

More signs to the profit motive from this thread by Dan Olson about how clueless the whole Telos Pictures thing was.
posted by provoliminal at 6:22 PM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

It seems to me that he isn't invoking any legal claim about copyright, but a moral claim about work, and creativity:

If you haven't done the work, you shouldn't pretend that the work is yours; if you haven't done the work, you shouldn't profit off the people who did do the work.

"It's cringe to take credit for work you haven't done, and it erases the work of the people who did the work" is also the thesis of HBomberguy's previous video, ROBLOX_OOF. In that case, Tommy Tallarico owns the company and owns the copyright, so legally, financially, sure, he gets to profit off the sound effects whether he made them or not. But morally? Guy, you've got a waterfall in your house and your ego is still so fragile that you need to take credit for a huge number of things you've never done, what's going on?

Like a lot of leftish creatives, I have complicated feelings about copyright. But "don't take credit for what you didn't do" is an easy principle for everybody to get behind.
posted by Jeanne at 6:26 PM on December 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

It seems to me that he isn't invoking any legal claim about copyright, but a moral claim about work, and creativity:

A moral claim, but also an objective claim about quality. Plagiarized work sucks, and you can tell, with evidence. The earlier bits of the video were more focused on that.

At some point, that thesis was abandoned though, because that one dude was such a drama sleazeball, and a parasite that needed to be lanced from the body of the exploited patrons
posted by eustatic at 6:32 PM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

That Dan Olson tweet thread speaks directly to what I mentioned earlier in the thread about him posting a video about his Patreon not making enough money and having to stop making videos.

It's interesting to have the full context for that. Thanks, Dan Olson!
posted by hippybear at 6:38 PM on December 4, 2023

Also, apparently inactivating his Patreon removes patron's ability to independently remove their patronage amount. One wonders at what he could possibly think he is doing as a next move if anything if he's as short sighted as he seems.
posted by provoliminal at 6:54 PM on December 4, 2023

The two outstanding unexpected effects of the video to me so far are the volume of people who feel empowered to continue or try at writing because they couldn't be worse than this plagiarist, and many people with ADHD who can get it to settle and be productive with a new hbomberguy video on.
posted by provoliminal at 7:07 PM on December 4, 2023 [14 favorites]

I've been toying with the idea of trying to make some video essay lately, and yeah, this is in some way heartening, at least there are a lot of people who are probably even worse than I would be, and who don't even try.

My main problem (apart from finding the time and motivation to sit down and do it) is that the kind of stuff I'd like to talk about (cult film of various kinds) is heavily censored on YouTube now, you can't have cursing, or even mild nudity or violence/gore, to the point where even people who just talk about, say, VFX in movies, have "uncut" versions of their videos on their own sites, but on the other hand, posting video essays on some other platform that's not YouTube seems like a total non-starter if you want them to reach any kind of audience. I'm not looking to make any money off it, but I would like for more than like three people to see it.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:50 PM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Somerton's misogyny and transphobia is a lovely side dish to the plagiarism main. What a piece of shit.
posted by Dysk at 10:44 PM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I enjoyed this video because I find it soothing to hear a guy very sincerely assert that truth and attribution and attention to detail matter and also, for a smaller percentage of runtime, that misogyny is bad. It made me reflect on a (paragraph-scale!) plagiarism scare I had in college that was never noticed but that I felt wildly guilty about, the proportionate gratitude I feel about not being in academia, and on the youtube channel that has been shot-by-shot copying my former employer's youtube channel (no consequences except for my former employer leaning more into parasocial deployment of underpaid employees (harder to copy)). Overall review: pretty fun!
posted by 26thandfinal at 10:45 PM on December 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

A tidy summary of the current state of things so far with pertinent quotes.
posted by provoliminal at 11:38 PM on December 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

Old cases are now being brought up, like when the podcast Chilluminati plagiarized historian Jonathan M. Katz last year.
posted by Kattullus at 2:09 AM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

On his other channel HBurgerGuy Brewis has posted a 20-minute supplemental video called Iilluminaughtii and the perils of lazy video essays which pretty much explains itself, but is still fairly jaw-dropping.
posted by Kattullus at 5:15 AM on December 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

What a video, eh? After watching it, I was struck by how much work Somerton put into not doing work. As a professor, I see this type of plagiarism for one of two reasons: 1) a person ran out of time but knew better, or 2) they person had so little confidence in their knowledge about a subject that faking the words was preferrable to writing new ones. Somerton is obviously in the second category. One of his excuses is that he was not a confident "writer," but it's really that he wasn't confident in the material, in being a reader that damns him. People that know a lot about a thing but aren't the greatest writers write all the time, and they tend to write their own words. Somerton's reading of Wikipedia on film theory came off as someone who doesn't have a passing understanding of film theory, they could not explain a short summary about it if asked at a cocktail party. Somerton knew he didn't know much, and he built a plagiarism empire on it.

When doing anything to make a living, one can start with the result and work backwards or start with a self-inventory and work forward. Like, why do you want to be a movie star? Do you want to create great performances that are lauded, appreciated, and compensated? Or do you want to be treated like a movie star, paid like a movie star, but really the fact that it's acting is arbitrary and doesn't interest you at all. So, you're a terrible actor because acting was always secondary at best, an arbitrary field of work that could have been any other. Somerton saw an opening, a grift and said "I want to be successful" and what he ended up doing, video essays about queer creative works, is meaningless to him and to the world. He fundamentally wanted to be seen as a professional in a field without any involvement and appreciation for that field. Say what you want about modern AVGN, but Roulf at least had a passion, an authenticity that showcased a real involvement in his work.

As a writer by trade, I've discussed with other writers how it's basically our worst nightmare to find out later to have accidentally borrowed even a single turn of phrase from research materials. To watch these people audaciously read for hours verbatim from others' original work, claim it as their own, and clumsily try to cover their tracks, knowing they've faced very little in terms of actual consequences even once caught, is mind-boggling.

Folks like Somerton prey upon these anxieties. They cast their blatant theft as that "oops, I got caught by an arcane rule doing my job" because they know that much of their audience fears that their normal, non-theft creative work might be flagged or seen as theft by a capricious algorithm or a malicious troll. The worst conmen use honest worries to deflect from their scams, painting themselves as a victim of those same fears.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:06 AM on December 5, 2023 [16 favorites]

This may be common on Reddit, but I was shocked to see comments by AI-bots on the HBomberguy thread about the episode, specifically a product summary about the book The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War on Homosexuals.

Absolutely not the time, topic and place, even if there were ever a time, topic or a place for garbage LLM nonsense.
posted by Kattullus at 7:02 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thanks for this: On his other channel HBurgerGuy Brewis has posted a 20-minute supplemental video

In addition to enjoying more examples of crappiness, I also appreciated his addressing the changing appearance of his beard.
posted by Gorgik at 7:25 AM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Absolutely not the time, topic and place, even if there were ever a time, topic or a place for garbage LLM nonsense.

In the future, I'd like to see LLM-produced content passed off as real writing carry with it the same kind of stigma as plagiarism.
posted by JHarris at 9:06 AM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I suspect a lot of these content-mill style productions are going to rely a lot on that sort of LLM "summarize this book" and "rephrase this article." Which will probably decrease the amount of obvious word-for-word copying seen here, but increase the number of weird factual errors.
posted by RobotHero at 9:38 AM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

toward the end of the video

OK. I'll keep plugging along.
posted by doctornemo at 10:23 AM on December 5, 2023

Archaeology Tube brings us Don't Be Like James Somerton: Advice on Citations and Plagiarism [27m], an explainer about exactly how citations work.
posted by hippybear at 12:02 PM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I do find the constant references to citations or the lack thereof, both in the original video and much of the surrounding chatter on the Internet, slightly puzzling. The issue here isn't really lack of citation; no amount of giving credit makes the kind of wholesale ripping off at issue alright, no amount of citation makes it not plagiarism, makes it not blatantly illegal.
posted by Dysk at 12:10 PM on December 5, 2023

I agree that there's no amount of giving credit that would make this kind of wholesale copying all right - but I do think the lack of citations is important.

Because in each of these cases, the plagiarist skips citing their sources in order to hide the plagiarism. They did not want to make it easy to figure out just how much they were copying, or how little original thought and writing went into their videos. They did not want to show up in search results if the authors searched YouTube for their names or their book/article titles.

If you're citing correctly - and not including any of your own original thought and writing - it's going to be immediately obvious. Your videos are going to look lazy and low-effort.

It's the crime and the cover-up, and the careful avoidance of citing sources - not just sloppy or neglectful lack of citations, but purposefully making it harder for people to figure out where content is being stolen from - is a smoking gun in terms of the cover-up.
posted by Jeanne at 12:29 PM on December 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

(Especially because it's so common for plagiarists to plead "Innocent, honest mistake!" when they get called out.)
posted by Jeanne at 12:31 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I dunno, these aren't academic works - citations are definitely nice, and I would encourage them, but they aren't actually required for pop non-fiction.*

Not directly plagiarising is required.

*(outside of direct quotes)
posted by Dysk at 12:35 PM on December 5, 2023

Now searching YouTube for James Somerton is yielding more and more videos reacting and responding to the hbomberguy situation.

I do hope he has other skills.
posted by hippybear at 12:47 PM on December 5, 2023

I agree that there's no amount of giving credit that would make this kind of wholesale copying all right

The film movements one where Somerton just read wikipedia - I think that could totally be 100% A-OK if he framed that as "Hey I put together a list of wikipedia articles to give an intro to this subject, and I'm going to read a bunch of them out loud so we can all learn a little about this topic". I chose the wikipedia example because they are explicit in allowing this kind of stuff with their license. When drawing from books, articles, documentaries etc, I'd still be fine with that approach, provided he gave proper credit, got permission for longer-than-just-a-quote excerpts, and framed his contribution as presentation, not as research or authorship.

Whether there would be any audience for this, I have no idea. I suppose James Somerton doesn't think there is.
posted by aubilenon at 1:01 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Whether there would be any audience for this, I have no idea.

There are indeed entire swaths of YouTube videos which are people reading various articles out loud to you, quite often with the text on the screen, their own video feed over in a corner, and moving a hi-vis cursor across the screen while they read. These videos are of articles of ALL sorts, and often involve commentary and cross-referencing with other materials, but yes, they are someone reading to you on video.

Also, Hasanabi pointed out in HIS video that likely if, say, Iiluminaughtii had just done a "let's watch" of the Anti-Vax documentary with pausing to add her own thoughts, that likely would NOT have been seen as plagiarism, but instead as a reaction video.
posted by hippybear at 1:32 PM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Like, reaction videos can definitely be extruded YouTube product but it's honest about what it's doing.
posted by RobotHero at 1:40 PM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

There are indeed entire swaths of YouTube videos which are people reading various articles out loud to you, quite often with the text on the screen, their own video feed over in a corner, and moving a hi-vis cursor across the screen while they read.

And unless they have an agreement with the article writer or publisher, or the article is published under a Creative Commons license or something, that is also illegal as hell. It's effectively no different to selling audiobooks, which you cannot just up and do if you don't have specific rights/authorisation or authorship.
posted by Dysk at 2:36 PM on December 5, 2023

I think part of the broader conversation needs to be:

YouTube's algorithmic encouragement of quantity-first in a zero-sum environment, and
A total lack of consequences on the platform for any form of IP theft that isn't algorithmically identified and punished. (Which is usually in the form of a half-arsed implementation of a legislative requirement.)

A content meat grinder is inevitable, not a surprise. It's a shame that YouTube believes that it's not worth their time to properly moderate this and make the site "better" because, in part, their definition of better (more profitable) is not our definition of better (quality content). Creator burnout is not something they'll ever likely acknowledge as their problem (or even 'a problem').

I would be all for a wholesale purge of; reaction videos, voice synths reading Reddit posts, TikTok compilations and all the similar low-effort, high volume noise currently clogging up the place.
posted by krisjohn at 3:47 PM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

It may be illegal, but I think morally it's a lot less dubious than passing off someone else's work as your own. Right now on the bird site there are a lot of Internet Historian fan weirdos (i don't mean to paint you with this brush, Dysk) who are whatabouting because, like, hbomb seems fine with Hasanabi doing react videos (or at least didn't call him out for it). I'd argue that it's because his focus was on plagiarism and react videos are not plagiarism.
posted by axiom at 3:51 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's effectively no different to selling audiobooks, which you cannot just up and do if you don't have specific rights/authorisation or authorship.

Yes, but you selectively cut off what I was saying about these videos of people reading, which is that they include commentary and cross-referencing. They are not the original work in its complete form, even if they do involve people reading to you.

These things are literally online if you want to find them, I shouldn't have to bear the burden of explaining to you what they are like. But here, here's one of them, about Q*. It's a pretty pure example of the form I'm describing here. You can jump past the first 2m55s where he spends time setting the background for what he will be reading, if you feel this is unimportant but it might be because it's context that he's pulling together for what he's about to read... But at around 2m55s, he begins to read.
posted by hippybear at 4:13 PM on December 5, 2023

I dunno, these aren't academic works - citations are definitely nice, and I would encourage them, but they aren't actually required for pop non-fiction.*

Why wouldn't they be?
posted by creatrixtiara at 4:16 PM on December 5, 2023

What exactly would be the form of pop non-fiction wherein references would not be required?
posted by hippybear at 4:18 PM on December 5, 2023

Any number of articles and blog posts explaining stuff, "ten facts about [x]" listicles, how to guides, etc, etc. Here It's a random example of a thing that undoubtedly used reference material for research to tell the story, but no citations. Because it isn't academia, and doesn't aspire to be.

Why wouldn't they be? There simply isn't a cultural norm for it, nor laws that require it. Research ethics, sure, but that's academia again. Of course, if you don't cite your sources, there's a limit to how seriously you can be taken. Hence, pop non-fiction that doesn't aspire to "real" research.
posted by Dysk at 4:44 PM on December 5, 2023

But are react videos not plagiarism?

There was a comment, either to the video itself, or possibly Dan's Xitter thread, that said something like "But if you have to attribute every quote like "As said in A", "In A's explanation", "A demonstrated", won't it get repetitive?" with the answer being "Yes, that's how you know you need more sources". Are react videos just content that's somehow found how to make basing your entire thing around a single source acceptable? Are react videos plagiarism? Are they copyright violations? Are they somehow wedged between the two if you hammer hard enough with a fair use mallet? What they almost certainly are is extracting value from someone else's work without compensating them, which I think goes back to the earlier comments about respect and the lack of it in Harris's video.

I don't know if you have to squint to see react videos as plagiarism, or as not plagiarism.
posted by krisjohn at 4:46 PM on December 5, 2023

Are react videos plagiarism? Are they copyright violations?

I don't think they're plagiarism. I believe they are copyright violations if they show the video they are reacting to. MST3k had to license the films they talk over, for example.
posted by Dysk at 4:50 PM on December 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

I can't believe I'm watching MST3k at the moment and I didn't think to draw the parallel.
posted by krisjohn at 5:57 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well I definitely got sucked into watching both this and the addendum focusing on Illuminaughti and the Todd and the Shadows video today. Holy hell, what a comprehensive take-down that will hopefully serve as something of a rallying cry for why this shit is important.

A few years ago, I actually spent months of my own life working on about three-four hours of content with the goal of taking down a problematic YouTuber (in our case, Onision. I was part of the small team that produced the Discoevry+ expose miniseries on him that seemingly led very swiftly to his deplatforming.) That has little to do with anything except that I was impressed while watching this from the perspective of someone who's done this kind of work for this kind of purpose. (In case you're wondering, it's incredibly satisfying.)

The Todd in the Shadows video blows me away because, as hippybear said, he's not really involved in this at all aside from being in the community of creators. He just saw a pattern of bullshit and decided to go down the rabbit hole.

But HBomberguy's video is the main event here, and it's astounding. Dude put together a 4-hour-long video comprehensively detailing plagiarism crimes committed by and against YouTubers I'd never heard of, and made that somehow captivating and engaging throughout. And the fact that he put that much time and effort into this, and that so many people are watching and talking about this thing (it's everywhere I go online today, all anyone is talking about), makes me hopeful. People care about this, and that kinda rules.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:24 PM on December 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

Writers are magic. Support the workers of the Wash Post, as they strike for 24 hours Dec 7th. Write your own letter here.

In solidarity, do not click Wash Post material Dec 7th. Withhold your attention.
posted by eustatic at 7:51 PM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

are react videos not plagiarism? ... What they almost certainly are is extracting value from someone else's work without compensating them

but they do that without trying to pass off the original work as the reactor's own, so not plagiarism.

All plagiarism is bad, but not all bad is plagiarism.
posted by flabdablet at 9:04 PM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

@flabdablet - So your vote is that they're "just content that's somehow found how to make basing your entire thing around a single source acceptable"?
posted by krisjohn at 11:08 PM on December 5, 2023

It's fine as long as you say "no copyright intended"
posted by aubilenon at 11:46 PM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

No, my vote is that reaction videos can fall anywhere on a gradient from genuinely original entertainment (for example, I really enjoy watching rather jaded kids visibly falling under the spell of the same music that moved me on first exposure all those decades ago) to utterly tedious appropriation.

When some self-regarding shithead leaves what they're allegedly "reacting" to running while they go off and take a piss or make themself a drink or whatever, I do wonder how the hell their subscriber numbers stay as high as they are.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 PM on December 5, 2023

Ok. That's one for "it depends".
posted by krisjohn at 11:51 PM on December 5, 2023

If you're interested in reacts videos and where the line is Jack's film's side channel has spent a year or so following Sniperwolf exploring this.
posted by Braeburn at 1:47 AM on December 6, 2023

reaction video from a woman who cut Somerton too much slack A deep and perhaps overly self-critical look at why it took her a while to realize there was something wrong with what he was saying.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:08 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I do hope he has other skills.

HBomb's video is getting so much traction that I actually worry a little about Somerton due to all the inevitable piling on that is going to occur. Not so much about his career as his health and life.
posted by charred husk at 5:26 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I follow a few reaction channels. BlindWave, Reel Rejects, Natalie Gold.

But they don't show the whole tv-show or movie they are reacting to. Just the highlights. They usually have a Patreon page where you can watch the full length reactions, but those do not show the video, it is expected that you watch along with your own video source.

I don't see that as plagiarism or even copyright infringement.
posted by Pendragon at 5:40 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think the discussion is getting a bit muddied because "reaction video" can refer to at least three distinct types of things:

- What are also known as response videos, like the one Nancy Lebovitz links a few comments up. This is someone filming their response to or reflections on a piece of news or a discovery. These do not typically involve copyright violations.
- Someone filming themselves watching or listening to another type of media. Also not inherently a copyright violation.
- Someone showing another piece of media, with themselves superimposed in one corner as they watch it. As this involves duplicating another piece of media, this is absolutely a copyright violation. I can't upload the latest Marvel film to youtube (especially not and get paid for it) and putting myself in the corner making faces and riffing along doesn't change that. The same applies for music and shorter-form video content, though it is very obviously not enforced on youtube.

With respect to highlights, this will likely vary based on jurisdiction, and the extent to which superimposing yourself constitutes transformative work. I can't upload highlights from yesterday's Premier League game to youtube and monetise it, for example. Putting myself in the corner, I don't see that that necesasrily changes it, really. I can't make a TV show that is a bunch of people analysing and reacting to the latest Premier League matches and show footage of the games, without licensing that footage from the rightsholders. The UK's concept of fair dealings allows an exception for reporting of current events, but that does not seem to be what this is. I cannot speak to the US concept of fair use (though my impression is that the courts' understanding of the same is a little more restrictive than the average "no copyright intended" youtuber).

None of them are plagiarism (unless your 'reactions' are someone else's you're just revocalising, or something).
posted by Dysk at 6:10 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm interested to see that youtube posters have done a better job of opposing plagiarism than the government has.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:10 AM on December 6, 2023

Where I've mostly come across reaction videos is in some deep-nerd gamer shit that I watch, where one very popular creator in that arena mostly creates in-depth informative dives into stuff, or playthroughs that take a similarly long time to create, and will on occasion do a reaction video to something that someone else in that arena has done. I don't love them but I give them a moral pass for a number of reasons:

1. He tries to get express permission first, and failing that, says at the top of the video "Hey Original Creator, if you don't like this, let me know and I'll take it down with no hard feelings."
2. He hypes up the original creators and talks about other stuff they've done.
3. All the creators in this space (who are big enough to do this as their job) are doing stuff that takes a while, feeding a beast that wants more content than they can churn out at the quality they go for, and this is one of a few tools they have to do something quickly and easily.

That last point is something, I think, that HBomberguy's epic gets to around the margins a lot. The Beast craves content. I don't know why Somerton and Blair got into this racket, but it looks a lot like they were never passionate about having any actual expertise in the stuff they were covering, but rather found very lazy ways to take other people's work and repackage it as their own for the money and attention. AVGN, on the other hand, started out as someone passionate and doing his own thing, and then got commodified into what we see in the video. If folks who make videos about the minutia of Pokémon history or whatever for a living need react vids as a sort of release valve so that they can post something - anything - in their feed while working on the more time-intensive stuff that they're actually passionate about making, and that keeps them from just devolving into plagiarism or becoming mouthpieces for the games they cover or something else shitty and hollowed-out, I'm fine with it? Especially when they're also pointing viewers towards the other creators they're reacting to. That just seems like healthy community to me. (This is also a space where you'll see a lot of "I got this idea from watching [[other creator's]] videos, which are great. I wanted to try it, but go check them out and subscribe to them because they're awesome.")

But that's just one pretty specific variety of a much larger phenomenon, and like all things, on and off YouTube, some of the folks involved are going to be as lazy and venal as they can get away with being.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:51 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

As well as learning about giving proper credit, Somerton should really take lessons from HBomberguy in presentation. I know judging Somerton from clips in a takedown piece is unfair but his videos are really terrible - bad lighting, flat diction in an annoyingly condescending tone, clothes that do not look good on camera.

HBomberguy's onscreen segments in contrast are well lit, engaging, and he somehow manages to wear a ripped lab coat better than Somerton wears a turtleneck.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:54 AM on December 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

“James Somerton & Community Solidarity”—Jessie Gender After Dark, 06 December 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 8:17 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

The amount of self-reflection and reckoning that is still shaking out from this is pretty interesting.
posted by hippybear at 9:02 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am not familiar with any of these people or that sphere of YouTube (Other than those shitty robot movie recaps) but I watched the whole thing yesterday and it was riveting.

What really blows my mind is how all four of the examples succeeded despite being obviously, utterly, devoid of charisma, sincerity, or professionalism because YouTube, its algorithm, and the audience reward prolificacy. I almost wish I had seen some of Somerton's work before this or someone had set up a Pepsi taste test with a clip of plagiarized material vs. original work, because the difference seems so glaring. The only time he doesn't resemble a dog trained to recite the Lord's Prayer without any understanding of the sounds he's making is when he's vile about women, though of course by the time we get to that point in the video, we've been primed for 2+ hours to jump on that disparity.

Which leads to the video and its creators. It's meticulously researched, produced by people with brains in their heads, and mostly well-presented (He's a millennial, I understand they are legally required to yell and overact and swear in their videos at least once every 20 minutes). It's fascinating to watch something that has a lot in common with what it's tearing down, but done well and in service of something bigger than just World of Tanks and VPN ad revenue.

Almost four hours of my life I'll never get back, and it was time well-spent. Thanks, Pendragon, good post.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:14 AM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

somehow manages to wear a ripped lab coat better than Somerton wears a turtleneck

I found that turtleneck a little jarring as well. At first I thought maybe it was run-of-the-mill overcompensation for insecurity about the look of a body part but by the time Brewis was done with him it became clear that he'd just been trying to cover up a massive case of brass neck.
posted by flabdablet at 9:35 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't want to pick on his looks but there is something to how aggressively unattractive his output is in that he was not interested in that aspect of work either, and that aspect kept me from paying too much attention, thinking I was being biased against him. A lot of you tubers haven't mastered their aesthetics and are on a journey, with their presentation, look, composition, etc. While the good you tubers reward people for paying attention, like hbomberguy's many jokes, a lot of people just listen to videos and you only have to be that much more interesting than you are annoying.
It's like he knew enough to buy the right brand of dress but had no idea how to wear it or accessorize, but it was enough for the incurious pass over, but people would balk after paying a sufficient amount of attention. His only real asset was the volume of his output, which youtube and viewers reward enough so he could half ass the rest. There was no way this could last forever, but he conducted himself like it was his only plan. The movie thing is an odd duck, though. Did he assume it was that easy to do or did he never plan on following through? He doesn't seem together enough to have a grand plan beyond trying to make enough videos for the algorithm.
posted by provoliminal at 10:15 AM on December 6, 2023

A fairly interesting sideways reflection on the Somerton situation: An Academic’s Half-Hearted Non-Defense of James Somerton [18m]
posted by hippybear at 12:23 PM on December 6, 2023

That's certainly an interesting perspective. I think it's driven by working on a field with limited popular appeal, though. Somerton wasn't stealing from obscure academia predominantly, he was stealing from YouTube videos and articles in popular press, not academic journals. They weren't as locked away in books nobody reads to begin with as Prof Skye's examples to begin with.
posted by Dysk at 1:44 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

A lot of you tubers haven't mastered their aesthetics and are on a journey

and some continue to give no shits at all about it while still producing worthwhile original content at volumes vastly exceeding Somerton's.
posted by flabdablet at 1:48 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

More people could try the Shaun approach if what they have to say can hold your attention.

I fully use you tube like television, and having a frequent uploaded channel counts for a lot in that aspect, but it's at odds with quality. That's why it has it's special touch that a nearly yearly video channel took him down and this one video has captivated a big chunk of the online space.
posted by provoliminal at 2:34 PM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm just really appreciating the variety of people even my limited view of YouTube is showing me are reflecting on what is going on. I'm also wondering if there are any channels which are going to be suddenly mysteriously silent for a while.

It's not often an entire network of creative people end up having a reckoning about the craft they practice, but it seems like that's going on to some extent.
posted by hippybear at 2:35 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

What really blows my mind is how all four of the examples succeeded despite being obviously, utterly, devoid of charisma, sincerity, or professionalism because YouTube, its algorithm, and the audience reward prolificacy.

Well, I watched a couple of Internet Historian's videos chronicling failed conventions (DashCon and a long-running furry con that ended up quite badly), and I suspect what drew me in was his using a well-known stock photo as his avatar; Illuminaughtii had the crudely-animated avatar of someone with the Eye of Providence symbol for a head. These are slim reeds to build a brand on, but somewhat eyecatching--the former caught my eye. Maybe appearing sincere if not sartorially gifted was Somerton's? I dunno.

Anyway, I'm most of the way through the video, and it has been a rewarding experience; I took a break to watch one of hbomberguy's other videos, the one on the whole "Soy Boy" scam/bullshit, and if someone is still hesitant to invest the time on the longer one, this is a pretty good gateway drug to his style and content.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:36 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whoopsers, this is the video that I intended to link to. (The other one looks good and I'll be watching it as well.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:44 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I watched a lot of Iiluminaughtii's videos, and she was not devoid of charisma or sincerity in her videos. She regularly expressed quite a bit of empathy about people who were the victims of the MLMs or other scams she was bringing to light with her videos. I actually think she was doing some good works with her talking about MLM scams that people get caught up in every day.

Same with Somerton. He presented as a pretentious ass, but he presented as exactly he kind of pretentious big city queer with attitude that I've known in real life. And while I was turned off by his misogyny and weird fascination with Nazi imagery, I was pleased that someone was presenting some form of queer history and analysis at all, because "back in the day" most major cities had entire bookstores devoted to ONLY LGBT material and all of those are gone now. So he was kind of, for me, a journey back into that era.

The Iiluminaughtii situation has other ramifications, with her having somehow entangled herself in other YouTubers' lives in weird financial ways, so when her schtick started to fall apart, she got really nasty and personal and started trying to take apart the lives of people she was tangled with.

I only know these things because she's someone I'd been watching for a while and suddenly it all went sideways for her.

Honestly, the plagiarism stuff hbomberguy lays out in his video about her are things I had not known, I'd only seen the weird Drama Stuff that was going on.
posted by hippybear at 2:46 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Prof Skye's lament points to how someone who wanted to collaborate or who he asked permission of so as to make his channel like a magazine or journal instead of plagiarism would have been just as popular and all the more worthwhile and should anyone care to do that, people are eager for it.
posted by provoliminal at 3:19 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Holy shit, according to this summary video [13m], Somerton was making $170K from his patreon and other income before all this collapsed?

Fuck!

I should start a YouTube channel and plagiarize a bunch of shit and make that for a while, bank all of it and then just exit.

I've never made anything close to that for honest blue collar work in my life.
posted by hippybear at 4:03 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Poorly regulated markets push out honest participants. Then they push out the "only a bit dishonest". Then they push out everyone except serious, career criminals. Regulation to allow honest, quality participation is necessary not just for the honest operators and the consumers, but for the market itself. YouTube appears yet to understand this.

Meanwhile, holy crap, that sssniperwolf stuff is bad.
posted by krisjohn at 4:13 PM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

That SSSniperWolf situation might be worth its own FPP as it is entirely unrelated to the subject of this one other than YouTube being involved.
posted by hippybear at 4:21 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The deliberate erasure of sources in the videos she steals is related. Even the doxxing is related if you look at the brigading both she and James have done. The Venn diagram of the topics in Harris' video, Todd's video on James Somerton, and SSSniperWolf's wrong-doing has at least a little bit in the middle where everything overlaps, surely.

Not that I would object to an hbomberguy-style video on SSSniperWolf and the spectrum of reaction videos with deliberate source erasure to fan commentaries that facilitate discovery.
posted by krisjohn at 4:46 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not that I would object to an hbomberguy-style video on SSSniperWolf

Well, you best get started and we'll meet back here in six months?
posted by hippybear at 5:11 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Six months? Who do you think I am? Dan Olsen?
posted by krisjohn at 5:13 PM on December 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

SWOOP did a video on the SSSniperwolf situation.
posted by Pendragon at 4:37 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

don't tell me you posted a video link w/o providing an exhaustive summary as to whether it's worth my time to view it, Pendragon
posted by elkevelvet at 6:50 AM on December 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yeah... that's kind of my brand now :-)
posted by Pendragon at 8:58 AM on December 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

I guess I'd really only gotten the doxxing part of the SSSniperwolf situation, and didn't know all the other stuff.

This whole thing is a bit like reading the soap opera digest magazines they used to sell at the checkout stands. All these stories happening that you can catch up on.
posted by hippybear at 11:04 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Okay, and that SSSniperWolf video just keeps getting better.

If you thought Somerton was stealing other peoples' work, he's a complete amateur compared to Lia.
posted by hippybear at 11:35 AM on December 7, 2023

Goodness, there's been a lot of commentary here while I've been watching the video. I'm not done with it, but it's very well done for such a long video. There was one section where I felt like a certain point got repeated a couple too many times, but for the most part, it's pretty tight while being so detailed.

The section I'm watching now, on James Somerton, makes me think a couple of things.

First, the words he plagiarizes are, to my ear as an academic lit scholar, so obviously lit-scholar-y that I feel like they throw up red flags in that way. For instance: "This isn't just queer behavior being portrayed in a positive way, but one of the many ways that the film obfuscates gender and supports a pansexual ethos." I'm willing to bet Somerton has no idea what that means.

Second, the thing about "Big Queers" capitalizing on the works of "Small and/or Dead Queers" makes me think of Sarah Schulman's long-held conviction that "Rent" plagiarizes her novel "People in Trouble." I've only seen Rent once, a very long ago, and read "People in Trouble" even longer ago than that, so I can't evaluate her claim. But now I'm thinking about digging into it more, out of my own curiosity. Maybe I'll make a video essay!
posted by Well I never at 12:28 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

“Plagiarism Expert Responds to hbomberguy's Plagiarism Video” [35:47]—Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today, 07 December 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 2:08 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The sources he plagiarizes make a pretty good reading list. This blogger has tracked them down and put them in one handy place: The Treetop Inn.
posted by Well I never at 2:26 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah... that's kind of my brand now :-) -- Pendragon

🌍👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀
posted by krisjohn at 5:58 PM on December 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

That part of the video is exploring the devolution of AVGN from a work of love into "content"; and on the value of writers.

This part was fascinating to me. I'm a writer, sort of well known-ish in certain small circles. I write from passion! and commitment! and just the love of sharing my ideas! etc, and I simply couldn't get into a mindset where the creator would allow what he was doing to be so perverted to make money.

On the other hand, I've been really sad about the mainstream success of a formerly niche m/m romance writer I love(d). I DNF's (Did Not Finish, in the parlance of online book reviews) three out of four of his last books. His early books took fascinating chances, and a couple of them remain among the best of the genre, in my view. Now he's writing a book every twelve weeks or so, and they're still much better written than the bulk of the genre, but he's stopped writing really fascinating, odd, complicated characters, and he's stopped putting them realistically into subcultures (like BDSM culture) that m/m romance, when it deals with them, handles very, very badly. I'm happy for his success and financial well-being, but I miss the bold writer he used to be before he made it big.

His situation isn't as stark or as morally bankrupt as AVGN's, but it's on a continuum with it.
posted by Well I never at 6:36 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I dunno, these aren't academic works - citations are definitely nice, and I would encourage them, but they aren't actually required for pop non-fiction.*

They should be.
posted by Well I never at 6:40 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

That part of the video is exploring the devolution of AVGN from a work of love into "content"; and on the value of writers.

This part was fascinating to me. I'm a writer, sort of well known-ish in certain small circles. I write from passion! and commitment! and just the love of sharing my ideas! etc, and I simply couldn't get into a mindset where the creator would allow what he was doing to be so perverted to make money.

Well, so, I've seen this happen with sitcoms.

The really classic example is Family Matters and that one time they decided to have that annoying next door neighbor kid on, who slowly came to dominate the show over time to the point that everyone involved hated Urkel but nobody could not NOT have him on the show.

But other examples are the sort of twin examples of Perfect Stranger and Dharma & Greg. Both of these are shows that were based on a rather classic pairing of Uptight Conservative with Cultural Outsider. In both of these series, the opening order of shows focussed on how the Outsider, be that Balki or Dharma, had lessons to teach the Insider about life, because both Larry and Greg are too uptight and really need to loosen up. But as these shows morphed, either quickly or slowly, they changed to where the Insider had all the common sense and was doing things to keep the Loony Outsider in line, because they were too disruptive to society.

It's a very very subtle shift, but it is so entirely a flip of the original script. And it takes place right in front of everyone's eyes, but nobody notices because they keep watching. But what used to be subversive and preaching against the mainstream has become something that backstops it against the outsider, seeking conformity.

So yeah. Things get perverted to make money. In these cases it was probably about the response of focus groups. In the cases of YouTubers, they have this insane dashboard that shows them exactly when people click away from a video they've made, so if you're really nuts about it, you can refine refine refine.
posted by hippybear at 7:25 PM on December 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

every youtuber after that hbomberguy video dropped:
posted by jason_steakums at 9:27 PM on December 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I now feel like maybe it would be nice to have a disclaimer or something attached to this post about a video by Somerton that I made nearly a year ago. I wonder if we can get that done somehow.
posted by hippybear at 11:08 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

hippybear, adding some tags to this post naming the guilty parties might do the trick in terms of warning anyone who came across your earlier post.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:12 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I now feel like maybe it would be nice to have a disclaimer or something attached to this post about a video by Somerton that I made nearly a year ago. I wonder if we can get that done somehow.

Looks like Somerton's channel is now gone. I'm not sure how recently that happened, there were a few videos up a couple of days ago.
posted by Gorgik at 11:47 AM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not so much gone as moved everything to private. He obviously won't delete all his "hard work"...
posted by hippybear at 12:58 PM on December 8, 2023

Okay, on some level this video might actually need its own FPP because it's great on its own. But I think putting it here means you're a targeted audience already primed for long videos about plagiarism. So here is, from Philosophy Tube, A Man Plagiarised My Work: Women, Money, and the Nation [1h]. It's an interesting video not only because it's an interesting topic, but also, because it is a really really great demonstration of exactly HOW to do citations in a video like this.

I don't know if she's always done citations like this, as this was only released today in the wake of this whole other cycle of scandals, but it is really very well done, with directly showing source books on screen, in-line supertitles with references, and other ways she's making clear her sources.

And completely abusing the edit window... I wish more videos really demonstrated their sourcing like this. She's made the presentation entirely entertaining.
posted by hippybear at 1:42 PM on December 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Back when I was teaching 8th grade science I taught my kids about plagarism, and when inoffered essays for extra credit I did so with the explicit understanding that plagarism would get an instant 0 and people who plagiarized would not be able to try getting extra credit via essay again.

100% of the kids who tried essays for extra credit copy/pasted directly from the first or second link that pops up when searching the term.

Apparently people mostly are both that lazy and that confident they can get away with it.

I hope there's no coming back from this for Somerton. The best outcome would be for him to just vanish from the internet.

But I doubt he'll stay gone for long. He had a moneymaker going and I doubt he wants to give it up.
posted by sotonohito at 1:45 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

We'll see if Somerton is completely mercenary soon, because there is always money to be made and notoriety to be had for a member of a persecuted group to sell out to the right wing grievance media sphere, and he's got one foot in some misogyny and transphobia already
posted by jason_steakums at 2:47 PM on December 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

I had assumed abagail's new video titled "A Man Plagiarised My Work: Women, Money, and the Nation" would be about Somerton, but it's not. Still a good watch.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:50 PM on December 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

"The Telos website has been removed and the corporation has been dissolved."
posted by provoliminal at 8:55 AM on December 9, 2023

I love how Indiegogo doesn't want anyone to lose faith in crowdfunding, but proceeds to be completely useless.
posted by krisjohn at 6:31 PM on December 9, 2023

Haven’t they always been the go to of choice for performative bull shit crowdfunding? Culture war weirdos seem to favor them.
posted by Artw at 10:16 AM on December 10, 2023

So, just a casual observation, I'm seeing a lot more on-screen citations in videos produced in the past week or so. A little line at the top or the bottom that tells where information that is currently being talked about is coming from. I haven't pursued any of these citations to see whether these are direct quotations or paraphrasing, but it's a marked different from what I had noticed going on before, and I support it as a general trend.
posted by hippybear at 6:51 PM on December 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I do find myself wondering from time to time... "what is James Somerton doing right now"

I had much of my life stripped from me against my will once. But nothing like what he's going through right now. And I just wonder, as a human being, what is he doing right now?

No way to know, and even if he were self reporting would I believe him? But it's a thought in my head.
posted by hippybear at 6:55 PM on December 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wouldn’t have guessed this would blow up to this extent. Well spotted.

As an aside, I don’t watch many of the people here but having seen none of her content, SS Sniper Wolf is a nazi, right? Like the name and the whole aesthetic… it’s like a bit where everybody’s not saying it for some reason? We’re all doing a bit here? Again, I haven’t seen a single one of her videos and only heard of her third hand, but c‘mon.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:45 PM on December 10, 2023

SSSniperWolf gets her name from being I think 13 and naming herself on some channel SexySexySniperWolf. I can't remember which video I watched as part of all this shakedown that told me this but that is actually the truth. She's a fan of the Metal Gear franchise, and had an earlier channel called sexysexysniper.
posted by hippybear at 8:02 PM on December 10, 2023

from what I can tell, her aesthetic is "be sexy" so if you're getting nazi from her "whole aesthetic" I have some questions. Actually I don't want to know never mind
posted by Baethan at 8:04 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, honestly, there are a lot of things to be outraged about involving SSSniperWolf, and her name is seriously the LEAST problematic part of who she is. My favorite part, after learning about the plagiarism and other stuff is how she outright stole someone else's online life and presented it as her own.

Oh, yes, it's Swoop's video posted by Pendragon earlier in this thread.

You raise questions and then say you don't want to know, but actually, you should take the time to find out because maybe learning exactly how people deceive others online is an education that would be useful at some point.
posted by hippybear at 8:06 PM on December 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Things could be worse-- I suspect that if Somerton had chosen to brazen it out, he'd have people on his side, but he had enough capacity for shame that he didn't go that route.

Very tentative about SSSniperWolf since I haven't even managed to watch any whole videos about her, but I wonder whether youtube made her worse-- she built her persona around being childish.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:36 PM on December 10, 2023

SSSniperWolf gets her name from being I think 13 and naming herself on some channel SexySexySniperWolf.

The thought of being financially bound to your online persona from when you were 13 gives me chills, one of the first lessons learned in a generation that grew up partially online is oh boy is it important to be able to walk away from the embarrassment of figuring your young self out socially, emotionally and creatively in public spaces online. And that was before modern social media!
posted by jason_steakums at 4:42 AM on December 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Okay. I’ve just seen alt right people claim to be fans and assumed the name was an Ilsa reference.

The glasses make me think Baroness from GI Joe so I figured she was going for a villain look.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 6:40 AM on December 11, 2023

I hope there's no coming back from this for Somerton. The best outcome would be for him to just vanish from the internet.

But I doubt he'll stay gone for long. He had a moneymaker going and I doubt he wants to give it up.

i half expect him to stay disappeared for about a year or two, then come back with some highly critical comments about "cancel culture" and start in on the right-wing grift circuit as another one of the Right Kind of Gay, but with the Jobs/Holmes-Theranos Turtleneck
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:54 AM on December 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Cass Eris has a new video about citations and YouTube: How to not be a plagiarist.

Don't worry, it's a short one.
posted by Pendragon at 7:56 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

No way to know, and even if he were self reporting would I believe him? But it's a thought in my head.

In hearing this, about Somerton, I have to admit that I, too, sometimes am troubled by sympathy for the damned. As an example, Sam Bankman-Fried. He was horribly callous with other people's money. But, he was inexperienced, and in prison he probably won't be playing too many video games (although in the minimum-security white collar prison he's probably at, maybe he will anyway). But hearing about how his mother was shaking as her son was on the stand, still making terrible decisions while there, and her knowing that she was at least a little responsible for him making them... it seems great wealth does not necessarily protect one from every human ordeal. As for Bankman-Fried himself, I've made mistakes too, but I never had the means by which my mistakes mattered for much except in my own life.

Bad people who come to realize they're bad, and have to keep on living with that knowledge. Maybe they become better, but they still have to live with the consequences of their actions. Hell does exist, sometimes, right here on earth... although it's true that lots of terrible people are completely unrepentant. I have no insight into SBF's inner state, and it's very possible he's still happily eating his own shit.
posted by JHarris at 9:50 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

her knowing that she was at least a little responsible for him making them

incidentally, possibly more than a little
posted by BungaDunga at 11:37 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was also taken aback by SSSniperWolf’s name, but the Swoop video made it clear that she was an inattentive child rather than a Nazi. I don’t have any idea of her politics, but her name seems mostly unfortunate.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:50 PM on December 11, 2023

I'm interested in what happens with Somerton, but I know a big part of that is so the story can continue. The idea that he'd become a right wing grifter seems ludicrous to me. He clearly lacks talent, charisma, and intelligence and that seems to be the thing that damns him most of all. He didn't even have the elan of a George Santos spending on Sephora and Only Fans. Ultimately what he had to offer was community and he betrayed them in every possible way because they were a side effect of having a fan base to support him, not the point. They have started their own Discord and reportedly are fully behind the restorative actions of Kat Lo and Hbomberguy. Somerton's every action seems to scream a kind of ignorance, not the kind of opportunism it takes to keep trying new grifts. He didn't steal everything down to his look like Sssniperwolf. He just half assed a lot of things, which may have been him doing his best.

Nick has made his apologies and claims to have been completely unaware of any wrong going, which seems hard to believe but it's not beyond the scope of believability. He seemed to be James only friend, so I wonder if they are weathering the storm together.
posted by provoliminal at 1:12 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

He just half assed a lot of things, besides the whole plagiarism, making stuff up, and serious white gay chauvinism, oh, and the way he treated a lot of people like the Ace Couple... the list keeps growing the more I think about it.
posted by provoliminal at 1:27 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I would absolutely take the “will this person join the cancelled person right wing grift-o-verse” bet.
posted by Artw at 1:57 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the (now age-restricted for some reason) Todd In The Shadows video, he points out that there were some occasions on Discord where Nick says that he is lazy and doesn't really do research. So he's not totally innocent in all of this.

Here's a reddit response to the response.
posted by LostInUbe at 2:05 PM on December 11, 2023

Here's the reddit take on his future prospects for that matter.

Being gay is his only feature. It's what he used to stand out. It takes a lot to swing to the right like that. I'm surprised how many people think it's an option. I doubt he'd want the spotlight again after this and I wonder what he made of his community since he treated so many like his founding Telos members the Ace Couple so badly.
posted by provoliminal at 2:41 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Being gay is his only feature.

He appears to have secondary features of being a misogynist and transphobic in addition to that.

Plenty of misogynist and transphobic people who would love to have someone gay champion their cause if only so say “he’s gay, therefore he can’t be a bigot”.

Theres money in that, for the unethical.
posted by Artw at 4:07 PM on December 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm thinking his misogynistic and transphobic tendencies spring from his lack of community and exposure to people in the lgbt+ community because of his mindset that lent itself to plagiarism. Everything just points to the boy not being that bright and not having the means to move out of lazy thinking like his knee jerk prejudices. I remember bits of a video where he was talking about growing up poor, and he had body issues from having some long undiagnosed condition that kept him from losing weight. I'm not excusing anything he did at all, but I can see how he came to his position from a disadvantaged past.
posted by provoliminal at 4:36 PM on December 11, 2023

Laziness and not being bright, indeed a general incuriousness about the world, and not caring about community are also all assets in grift world.
posted by Artw at 4:39 PM on December 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

I guess time will tell, but I doubt he has the wherewithal to do it on his own and I don't see anyone recruiting him.
posted by provoliminal at 4:49 PM on December 11, 2023

This video has reached a small american football channel, jauguargator9, who has cited it as impetus to call out another football youtuber for plagiarism. (Note, he needs an editor, so expect repetition, but it's solid in it's receipts)
posted by Brainstorming Time! at 10:31 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

The continuing ripples from this are really fascinating. I hope it signals a change in the culture, but I suspect it only signals a change in the moment.
posted by hippybear at 2:31 PM on December 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

It is fascinating, but I also kind of want some people to take a deep breath. Two people both using the same book that is the definitive reference on an esoteric subject as a source isn't "plagiarism."
posted by ob1quixote at 6:45 AM on December 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you want to spend the time to hear from The Ace Couple in their own voices here is We were personally victimized by James Somerton from their podcast, 2h13m.
posted by hippybear at 2:37 PM on December 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

James Somerton's I'm sorry.
posted by provoliminal at 5:18 PM on December 20, 2023

Doesn't seem to have landed well.

Can't say I'm surprised.
posted by flabdablet at 6:42 PM on December 20, 2023

could this be the first time James Somerton has actually written a whole video script by himself
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:06 PM on December 20, 2023

Give it a while.
posted by Artw at 7:09 PM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am sorry indeed this drove him to attempt suicide, as that hits way to close to home for me. I have to keep reminding myself he's not just a fuck-up who let things get out of hand and had more grandiose ideas than he could really execute. While I'm sure he thought everyone was ripping off anything popular, because there are so many rip-off channels on YouTube, what he did went a little beyond copying someone else's aesthetic.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:23 PM on December 20, 2023

given that in the past he claimed to be on the verge of bankruptcy right around the purchase of a (needlessly, at that) very very expensive video camera, there's definitely a boy-who-cried-wolf angle to this that makes me feel not super great that I have reason to have reasonable doubts about the veracity of the claims, that they could just be another attempt at emotional manipulation of his audience (which he is no stranger to)
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:57 PM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

the “““apology””” video has been removed from YouTube
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:54 PM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Dang, I only got two minutes in before having to quit in disgust. Bad apologies are one thing; lying about suicidality for sympathy is just evil.
posted by mittens at 5:30 AM on December 21, 2023

Dang, I only got two minutes in before having to quit in disgust. Bad apologies are one thing; lying about suicidality for sympathy is just evil.

Is there something I missed that we know he was lying? Because when things blew up as big as they did, I was kind of worried that would happen and I think some other comments on here intimated the same concern.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:54 AM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure he's "lying about suicidality for sympathy." He might talking about his suicidality for sympathy, but plenty of people of all moral persuasions think about or actually kill themselves. Hell, even Hitler did, so I wouldn't immediately assume that he didn't think or even attempt to kill himself during what he would consider his worst day on earth ever, especially as he had basically red-ringed of death his entire career.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:56 AM on December 21, 2023

Is there something I missed that we know he was lying?

His entire history of interactions with the web?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:59 AM on December 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Due to a past acquaintance, I find it very believable that someone can both be genuinely suicidal and also be the kind of manipulative asshole who brings it up to deflect criticism.
posted by RobotHero at 9:09 AM on December 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Hey, this is just Virginia Woolf's suicide note!"
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:16 AM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

It has been speculated that the apology video and the brief window in which his Patreon was reactivated coincides neatly with the time when he would get to scoop up all the Patreon money from existing subs.
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on December 21, 2023

(Or almost did, it might have gotten shut down too fast)
posted by Artw at 10:58 AM on December 21, 2023

People are reposting Somerton's apology video to keep him accountable. He really should have never posted that video in the first place.
posted by hippybear at 11:56 AM on December 21, 2023

Jessie Gender discusses the specifics of Somerton's apology video

hoots discusses the generic style of the apology video
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:45 PM on December 21, 2023

It's very unsurprising, that he has tried to take his own life. A lot of people do bad things and are then sorry for it and hurt themselves. I've seen other people joking about this video, and some of them are really mean spirited. Further continuations of the fat phobia that immediately appeared, talking about his dead mum, etc.

I'm curious, to what extent can people making 'call outs' reduce the likelihood of that happening?

I'm sure plenty of people will 4ead this and think "Don't care, he did bad things", but when it comes to suicide most suicidal people think they've done bad things. The message our response to this sends to them is pretty rough.
posted by Braeburn at 2:17 PM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

It’s entirely between him and his therapist and we have no obligation to consider it our concern.
posted by Artw at 2:57 PM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think all you can do is not be personally aggressive to him or egg on anyone who is. In this situation specifically, the people who called him out are very much not the kinds of people who sic their fanbases on someone, it's just about the best case scenario possible for this kind of thing to have someone as thorough, sensitive and adamantly against shitty fans acting shitty as hbomb being the one to shape the narrative initially, so there isn't a whole lot to do beyond not personally being an asshole and maybe calling it out/flagging comments when you see that behavior in online spaces James might be likely to read.
posted by jason_steakums at 3:24 PM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think that in general callouts that escalate to huge dogpiles and harassment are bad, and people in general should make a reasonable effort to resolve things in a way that isn't needlessly mean and allows people to save face and make amends when they've done something wrong.

The thing is, Somerton has faced many smaller call-outs for plagiarism, and every time he's responded by denying it, attacking the people calling him out, calling them homophobic, maybe making some tiny surface edits that allow him to retain plausible deniability, and...continuing to plagiarize.

So what can you do? Keep treating him with kid gloves forever as he takes money people don't have to make movies he's never going to make?

We've all known somebody who's an asshole, right, and the second you call them out for being an asshole they're like "How could you do this to me, a person with depression???" And... at some point, the extra grace and tolerance you want to give that person on account of the genuine suffering they're going through has to collide against the fact that you're just done with their shit.

And of course social media makes it so much worse, and the whole thing where being a "content creator" means being in a parasocial relationship with your fanbase makes it so much worse, and I don't think any of this is easy, or reducible to "Don't care, he did bad things." But my sympathy for him is definitely dampened by the fact that he could have avoided this whole thing by taking it to heart any of the previous times someone had said, "Hey, you are stealing from me."
posted by Jeanne at 3:39 PM on December 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Thanks Jeanne, that's pretty much the argument that's been going through my head on this. I'd never seen any of the other stuff, so obviously had this video not come out (or been produced by a smaller creator) I wouldn't have seen it.

On the other hand, I'm generally in the business of suicide prevention, and the ability to do a 'public call out' is basically asking to give even a very mentally well person a bad mental health episode. We see this cycle of shaming and harassment, which is sometimes 'justified' and sometimes not again and again. It's not exclusively online, people can have a similar all encompassing villain of the week experience in their local area if they're accused of sex crimes.

I don't have a point, but I'm trying to pull apart why people's response to this is rubbing me the wrong way. Maybe because I engaged with quite a few of Somerton's podcasts where he spoke specifically about his own experiences rather than media plagiarism, so he feels more human to me? There's so many people who only see him as this month's boogeyman and are enjoying his suffering, or parasocially enjoying their favourite creators 'winning' at last against a bad community member. This guy stole about $70 from me! But I just can't summon up the vitriol and disgust that I've seen other people express.
posted by Braeburn at 4:00 PM on December 21, 2023

I don’t think we’re obligated to give a fuck about making his online experience nice on the offchance he isn’t lying either. Plenty of good decent people out there who aren’t massive bad faith actors tune probably making shit up for sympathy and attention, maybe direct concern there instead.
posted by Artw at 4:40 PM on December 21, 2023

Maybe because I engaged with quite a few of Somerton's podcasts where he spoke specifically about his own experiences rather than media plagiarism, so he feels more human to me?

I present this very gently, but is it possible that you have an interest in believing him so you don't have to consider if his other stories were stretching the truth?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:26 PM on December 21, 2023

That's fair. I guess I'll keep thinking about it, and in the meantime increase my donation to stonewall or something similar.
posted by Braeburn at 12:25 AM on December 22, 2023

On the flip side, I have an interest in believing he’s lying because I don’t like to think of anyone being in that state. I’ve extended as much belief as I’m willing to with him, but I wouldn’t wish suicidiality on anyone.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:47 AM on December 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hbomberguy's Vulture interview.
The plagiarism video has already passed 11 million views, making it his third most watched video.
posted by provoliminal at 7:43 AM on December 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

That Vulture interview does nothing but make me respect hbomberguy even more. He's clever and thoughtful and kind.
posted by meese at 8:24 AM on December 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

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