Hello Nerdfightaria!

These are my current thoughts on the issue of community building brought up by Andrew Bravener along with the responses I’ve watched and read.

There seems to be a disconnect between the older and newer youtubers. The newer ones seem to feel that there’s more of a community than the older youtubers are perceiving. And I have an idea of why that is.

The older youtubers started with a very small community in which they all interacted with each other and grew together. And that was wonderful and they have become fairly idealized in the eyes of the newer youtubers. And with that came this feeling of awe and power that was just bestowed upon the previous generation and I think that’s where the problem begins.

For the best of the new generation, going to a youtuber of the older generation and vying for their attention is extremely taboo and frowned upon. So they don’t. They create their own small communities (which there are far more of than the single one that used to be the community) and interact with each other and hope that the older generation will stumble upon them. And, from what I’ve observed, the youtubers in these small communities seem very content and satisfied with where they are and the friendships they’ve made.

However there are now two issues: 1) there are a lot of little communities that, while they have overlap, are still separate from each other. This isn’t really a major issue because they are continuously making incursions into each other and similar communities will eventually start to merge. The more important issue is that 2) what the older generation mainly sees is a huge quantity of content, some amazing, some horrible. And they’re being left to themselves to sift through it.

Here’s the thing, major youtubers will get comments and video responses. However, a lot of the comments don’t contribute anything and are just praise or a brief answer to a question or a completely random comment that’s disassociated from the topic of the video. And the video responses will often be the youtubers who don’t yet know what they’re doing and are not part of a small community and are reaching blindly towards their idols in hope of help and inspiration.

I’m not saying that they don’t get some amazing responses to their videos, I’m just saying that this is the majority of what they will see. And this will give them a very disheartening view of their subscribers.

So, there are these communities that are growing and evolving. But they’re mostly starting where the older generation started because the creators of the best content are those most hesitant to outreach to the older generation. So the older generation, while they know of some of these new youtubers, are unaware of the vast majority of them (also very much due to the changed nature of youtube with all of its different content that is really not of interest to this community but still is there and still requires the sifting). And this is what creates the disconnect.

What to do?

Well, while I’m not really a fan of the frustrated rant format of Andrew’s video, I think what he did and what he sparked is what we needed. One of the responses I think did the best job at responding (though not really as a direct response) was Kayley’s. She challenged her viewers to come to her. So maybe they will. Hopefully they will. Even I, not a vlogger, have considered attempting a video response.

That kind of outreach will help. Because youtube isn’t going to go into the channels of the small vloggers and try to help them based on their preferences. The best help that these small community builders can get is from the older generation and those with a fan base.

And I know this is putting a lot on their shoulders. But if they want the community they used to have, they’re going to have to put themselves back in it. It’s there and it wants them. It’s just scared of disapproval.

But I assure you. We want you in our community.

TTFN,

-Merr

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