YouTube: Where Naked Ambition Meets Community Values

This guest opinion piece was writted by Mark Day, an active participant in the YouTube community(ies). It evolved from a comment he left on a recent NewTeeVee post.

As bizarre as it might seem from the outside looking in, “self promotion” has become the deadliest of sins in the eyes of the YouTube community. Beyond YouTube’s own terms of service, there are unwritten codes of community conduct, broken most spectacularly by MadTV’s LisaNova, in the so-called LisaBot scandal covered recently by NewTeeVee.

To understand how a “look at me” culture developed such an itchy case of the “tall poppy” cooties, you probably have to go back to the Kennedy assassination of online video innocence, the unmasking of Lonelygirl15 as an actress (or was it Little Loca’s similar de-closeting?).

Now we’re left with a hangover where a vocal minority of the site’s users obsess on the “authenticity” (or lack thereof) of YouTube’s most subscribed personalities, and cry foul at anything that feels like less than “fair play.” Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on me. Fool us a third time, we’ll post “cheater” videos to expose, well, whatever seems worth exposing — page refreshers, extra accounts, a t-shirt that may or may not have been product placement.

The community contains both webcam diarists of modest ambitions, and larger-than-life personalities for whom ambition has collided with sudden opportunity. If the later group were in bands, they’d be in the car-park, flyering your windshield, passing out demos, recruiting for their street team. On YouTube, they’re always looking for an edge, a leg-up, a bigger slice of the spotlight.

YouTube needs both camps, but it creates a constantly shifting eco-system, where the envelope is pushed daily, and an expectation of fair-play has evolved into a kind of new video Puritanism – if Boh3m3’s Why Do You Tube resulted in almost 400 varied video responses, How You Should Tube is very much up for volatile debate.

The reality is, YouTube contains a number of communities, living under one roof. There are many fine, talented, quirky individuals who don’t aspire to seven-figure viewerships. How YouTube’s city slickers and country cousins learn to live in not-all-that-peaceful co-existence is one of the great social experiments of the age. In that context, LisaBot will probably prove to be just one bumpy pixel in a picture of a very bumpy road.

Mark Day is a videoblogger, copywriter, YouTube content partner, member of XLNTads.com’s creator advisory board, and online marketing consultant at RooftopComedy.com. He is based in the Bay Area.

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