I've seen a lot of people rightfully questioning why people were watching and giving money to this James Somerton guy, considering how... bad his videos were. Like watching a few minutes of his content evidences pretty clearly that he doesn't have much in the way of charisma, that his presentation of the subject matter was super bland, etc.
And a lot of people weren't just casually engaging with Somerton's work, they were subscribing to his Patreon or deeply invested in his Discord community. So it's not just, like, "oh people know this is garbage but they want some noise on in the background."
I think what's going on is that Somerton was making a quasi-passable imitation of better content, and Youtube was primed to reward that. Somerton didn't just plagiarize content, he also copied style. Like he even had the damn copy of Disney War on the table in one video. He did a lower-effort version of the aesthetics that a lot of video essayists employ – the props, the moody lighting, etc.
But the difference between him and the video essayists he was imitating is that he was uploading a lot more frequently. And I think that's the key: Somerton was basically making a surrogate product. There's not that much Lindsay Ellis video you can watch on YouTube. But if you watch it all, YouTube will suggest videos from slightly-worse creators. Consume enough of this material and you'll get James Somerton, and Somerton has a regular upload schedule and puts out a lot of videos, and at that point maybe you are not so discerning about the quality of the material because you're pursuing something that kind of reminds you of better creators, but is a lot more voluminous.
Like, the video essay game has gotten advanced over the last few years. Hbomb himself only uploads basically once a year now, and before she quit YouTube, Lindsay Ellis was going in the same direction of slower, bigger, more sophisticated videos before she quit YouTube. People are making feature-length documentaries. I have a pile of YouTube subscriptions that haven't uploaded in months, and I know those channels aren't dead, just working on some massive essay.
I think creators like Somerton and Illuminaughty were exploiting a niche borne out of this: that people want things that have the outward trappings of video essays (ie, stuff that doesn't immediately come off as thrown-together or vloggy) but at a volume that's simply not sustainable for a video essayist. And that constant volume makes their audience both parasocially bond with these creators more strongly (as we see with Somerton's very invested fanbase) and it kind of inures people to the low quality of the videos by sheer force of familiarity.
What's so insidious about this whole mess is that he stole most of the words he spoke into a camera from better writers. And so people rightfully assumed he was just a really good and prolific writer. If you're not paying close attention to his upload schedule, and why the fuck would you, you think he must be some kind of underappreciated academic genius that deserves a lot more recognition for all the hard work he's putting into his videos.
A lot of his (former) fans are going to be hurt and distraught over this violation of their trust. It could have repercussions on the whole YouTube ecosystem. And I do agree with Mr. Hbomberguy that the worst thing the platform can do is add more red tape, as it will only inevitably get abused by bad actors.
