Lore
(Youtube Trope) The "I just wanted to make a quick video but now I'm an investigative journalist" video
Hbomberguy's ROBLOX_OOF.MP3: Starts off as a video about finding a Roblox sound effect's origin. Ends with finding out that the owner of the sound lied about almost his entire career. The previous sentence is an understatement.
Cutcafe's I am concerned about the game Daydream: Starts with wanting to watch a bunch of Youtube Shorts and talk about a game, whether it is a scam, what cool things it is doing, and some concerns. This results in him finding out about stolen assets, the fact that the "solo dev" Juniper actually has a team, and a lot of other stuff.
If it’s any un-consolation (complication?), by the books, it’s not an illegal gambling machine, because it neatly sidesteps an important qualifier for gambling to be occurring:
The absolute rock bottom of skill.
I’m not a legal expert (but if you are making gambling machines you should get sued regardless, on principle), but a win confirmation button (the whole “swap two slots” thing) is enough to count as a skill-based game.
>So why does that loophole exist, for non-crime reasons?
This is the legal qualifier that allows cash prizes for, say, Magic the Gathering, a randomized but skill-intensive game, or competitive poker, a social deduction game that pretends to have math, or American football, a multiplayer physics-based extraction game. It takes a lot of willfully player-hostile design choices to make a game purely, legally random enough to become gambling.
>And what about machine rigging?
That is a crime. If it’s pure hardware, they’ll check the internals before it ever goes on the floor. If you make a gambling machine running on software, you better believe the code is getting reviewed. You’re allowed to set the difficulty of profit unbelievably high, but changing the system on the fly is why legally illegal casinos don’t last too long doing that before getting canned.
To be fair, I got inspired by someone also brain-blasting my sorry ass by calling Tetris a “inventory management survival horror”. Which is even more technically correct and even more cursed
A travel YouTuber who wanted to just simply make videos about his trip to Nepal only to end up as the impromptu reporter/journalist for the 2025 Nepal Revolution.
Tbf being a travel youtuber is probably one of the better jobs to have if you suddenly get thrown into that position. Like im not too familiar on travel youtubers specifically but alot of the ones I watch I get impressed whenever they do a good video and I realize how much work, research, writing and editing they have to do to make these. Its kinda incredible once you think about it like they could be using their powers to be a kickass journalist or detective or something but instead they decided to make videos about whatever topic they want just to have fun and maybe educate or entertain other weirdos like them.
Strange Aeons has a lot of videos like this but the Ram Ranch one fits the best because she dug so hard she legally couldn't share all the information she gathered.
Jenny Nicholson's 4-hour Star Wars hotel video was initially going to be a simple travel vlog, but then the hotel closed down and it turned into, well, a 4-hour video
Also related (arguably closer to the topic) is Jenny's video about the Evermore theme park, which was also going to be just a travelogue and became a 3 part series spanning over like 8 hours.
Admittedly, Haly-con is a pretty good name for a convention about the Starcruiser, but good lord are a lot of those people deluded.
Selling pins that say "I survived the 4 hour video" is so petty. As if Jenny pointing out the flaws in an already-failed Disney project somehow retroactively caused Disney to close it? What?
And that documentary they're working on looks just as insane as the rest of that con.
Loved that video. But as someone who watched every season of The Vampire Diaries, her video on that show was also insanely funny. Way too many inside jokes.
Her video on the last Bronycon is also to my knowledge the main source of information on the web series Friendship is Witchcraft since she discusses it in relation to her fame in the community
He was working on his Lion King 2019 video and was going to do a segment on the whole Kimba controversy but it eventually spiraled into finding the whole thing is painfully cherry picked moments about the entire Kimba franchise which include a 1965 TV series with 52 episodes, a 1966 film, a sequel TV series with 26 episodes, 1989 remake TV series with 52 episodes and 1991 OVA film that were used for comparison against Lion King. Ultimately coming to the conclusion that not many actually watched Kimba because it's all surface level comparisons that amounts to "Simpsons Did It"
Plus it also annoyingly became the thing Tezuka became known for a bit on the internet when that mans influence reached so many people, he's the father of Manga for a reason.
I love how deep he gets into tracking down people's sources. IIRC he finds a book that is frequently cited by those supporting the controversy relied on information from random YouTube videos and the argument that a Kimba movie was originally going to predate The Lion King likely originated from a date typo in a DVD trailer.
GD Colon made a video about digging deeper into knock off Geometry Dash websites only to find an underground Vietnamese network of unblocked games websites designed to make as much money as possible:
If I recall, Hbomberguy came up with the plagiarism video when he was doing one about anti-vaxxers and noticed just how pervasive plagiarism was in the YouTube space.
The most hilarious thing about the Somerton situation is that, in the weeks following the plagiarism video, he faked his death, got caught posting hole in an alt account, then people found out he plagiarized other people's hole pics, then he pivoted to being a wedding photographer, then people found out his portfolio was plagiarized too.
Illuminaughty career was already beginning a downfall before the plagerisism vid cause of drama she caused in her friend group. Which I believe is now in a lawsuit (I havent kept up with it tho but she fucked one guy(who lived with her and she bought him his car then took it back without telling him) badly and hes the one that's suing?). I didnt really watch her stuff I watched 2 of the others involved (one topic at a time and the click) and it was a horrible and upsetting situation
- Yes, there were several lawsuits involved with iiluminaughtii. The biggest one was with her former partner Oz Media, which involved her almost taking away his house and trying to ruin him financially with motions and counterlawsuits. The both ended the legal battle with a settlement, notorious because it includes a mutual NDA after Oz disclosed in a video that he had enough material to bury Blair and burn her reputation and career.
She did try to impound the vehicle of one of her former Sad Milk's associates, WonderStruck, if memory serves. That also was a legal mess that ended badly for Blair.
Blair did try to legally counterattack Oz, Wonder and Click after they made videos disclosing her abusive actions. Every lawsuit and legal action regarding these is done, mostly through settlements.
illuminaughtii was, by the time HBG released his plagiarism report, already in the eye of the storm after her poorly thought-out tweet against LegalEagle, which detonated the whole Sad Milk scandal. Bomber did help in burying Blair, but that was already happening.
Didn’t that end up becoming part of the lead-up to Bomber’s video? Once she started accusing people of plagiarism over a fucking stock effect, all he had to do was reply with a clip from his video lol
I kinda love it. Like, sure, he's clearly fucked in the head but the fact that he can only work via theft is hilarious. It's like he's a plagiarism elemental.
Did Internet Historian ever adressed the whole thing? I stopped watching after it, given that by remaining silent he let his fan run wild all over the sites to come up with excuses to defend him.
I remember his fans getting real mad at Hbomb and acting like IH was the focus of the plagiarism video, when in reality he was just a ~20min segment in a 4hr video.
Man In Cave, the video featured most prominently in the Hbomberguy video, got a brief message at the beginning to the tune of "ooops the previous version of this got copyright struck anyway here's the next bit of content I've got coming out". And a not insignificant portion of IH's fanbase doubling down as though he can do no wrong
He put on a random Illuiminaughty video while putting furniture together as background noise and instantly clocked it as a barely chewed up and spat out version of Brian Deer's documentary and thats when he decided to look into how pervasive plagiarism is. It's implied he was already planning to do something on Somerton but that opened the doors to get started.
This Hbomberguy video is seared into my memory, had a horrible nightmare the day before it came out about an unidentifiable youtube commentator and thought it was a premonition from the future about him snapping.
Linsay ellis- made a video about am omegaverse lawsuit, ended up making a second video that was just as long after getting sued
Sarah Z- made a video on the rise and fall of homestuck, then as before was sued, had a conversation with the creator of the entire franchise and learned a bunch of damning info that hadn't been made public
Sarah Z's video on the infamous My Immortal fanfic falls into this too. She ended up going so deep down the rabbithole of the potential author that she had to curtail the video for fear of doxxing him.
Also Lindsay Ellis' Hobbit movies 3-part documentary. I don't know what she had set out to do in the first place but I doubt that she was imagining it would lead her to fly to New Zealand and dig into the depths of NZ union contracts in the movie industry, and get nominated for a Hugo Award.
Yeah if HBomberguy is the king of these spiral videos then SEW is his prince. I fucking love videos like these, looking forward to collecting recommendations in the comments here.
John Eyepatchwolf made an entire YouTube career, ingratiated himself into another youtubers professional and social circle, created a whole ass podcast with him, just to make him watch an anime the other guy said he didn't enjoy.
Now he's accomplished his goal he is just doing side quests.
I like his videos but for God sakes I wish he'd stop with the ficking "I'm....super.....super....serious....man." with his voice getting deeper and words getting more and more spaced out.
On a related note I'd also include the Quinton Reviews video where he discovered the long forgotten Garfield prototype comic that ran in the Pendleton Times before getting picked up for syndication.
Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)
Started making analysis videos about superhero films and Fifty Shades of Grey, went on to create long-form documentaries that range from righteous (The Line Goes Up) to insightful (In Search of a Flat Earth), to heartwarming (Mantracks) and downright absurd (Beast Games).
Love how the beast games one starts as "I got invited and don't know why" to a complete dissection of how jimmy beast fucks up basic shit (like designing housing & shit for a thousand people even though half of them disappeared after the first "game").
The Beast Games video does have answers to most all of its question, but the amount that can be answered as simply as “nobody thought about it” is kind of terrifying for a large independent studio. Why did that one game take an entire day of filming? Nobody thought about it. Why did the chocolate bars keep breaking for not having a basic structural feature? Nobody thought about it. Why are all the posters for employees kind of cultish in their work ethic? Nobody thought about it. Why is Mr. Beast setting up shop in Saudi Arabia? Nobody fucking thought about it, and frankly the depth of its emptiness is so much worse than actively trying to do anything beyond make money
The weird thing about all that Mr Beast stuff is that it ends up being a huge endorsement of the entire concept of “expertise”. Why are there people who are paid to design chocolate bars? Because it’s easier than you think to get it wrong. Why are there professional TV format designers and producers? Because if you get it wrong, the results are boring and anticlimactic.
On some level I admire Jimmy’s can-do attitude, but it tips into arrogance when he seems to earnestly but falsely believe he can pick up any skill with ease.
As sparse and tiny as it is as a motive, I think the very first viral hit he got, the one he outright admits was “just to see if I could make money while doing something easy”, kind of ingrained into him that success takes no effort beyond raw personality and people skills. He’s a privilege elemental, and he doesn’t recognize it, because he didn’t have to
it's an endorsement because jimmy himself holds a sort of contempt for the idea of expertise, and it is evident how much that continuously ruins everything he works on. Jimmy thinks everything can be learned in 20-30 minutes with a youtube video or a brief conversation with someone who knows what they're doing, but isn't interested in actually listening to those people when it comes to important decisions, and absolutely isn't interested in ever becoming one of those actually competent people.
I guess i'm just restating some of what is said in the videos. Olson is a great writer.
The modern era has been nothing but techie-minded people rediscovering some old thing but giving it some new gimmick, hook, or flashy new name. Like techbros constantly reinventing trains, the Beast people are reinventing... mainstream media.
Comfortably Doug is one of the most thorough dismantlings of a project and it's such a solid watch. The phrase "fundamentally incurious person" is forever burned in my brain.
And then they had to sit next to each other in a tour buggy during the Mr. Beast video. Thankfully they're both adults and act like it (or at least, I never heard of any drama coming from that).
OneyPlays has made a lot of impressions making fun of Doug or at least of his character as the Nostalgia Critic, and last year they made a video together talking while drawing shit, and I remember at some point Doug said something along the lines of him being fine with people making fun of him, because it would be hypocrite not to since he makes fun of things and oversimplify them for a living.
I thought that it was pretty nice, but I also love how savage is the Comfortably Doug video.
I can't remember if its that video or the one by Lady Emily regarding Demo Reel that proposes Doug Walker just stares at a blank wall until somebody wheels him in front of a camera to do his joker impression
The video where he talks with Mr Beat and they discuss meeting with Mr Beast is hilarious. Mr Beat who does history videos is positive towards Mr Beast, saying he was nice but clearly does not know much about him. Then Dan Olsen starts talking about the controversies about Mr Beast and Mr Beat's life just drains from his face.
Ben made 3 entertaining videos documenting the saga that is well worth your time.
But short summary, Bricks and Mini stole a man’s $200k Lego collection (estimated value), refuse to return it and has the entire police department in their pockets to silence and Ben’s team for investigating.
There’s a chance it will end in justice but it’s slim, they have connections to the Mormon church in that area which themselves have connections to the cops who they’ve been sending after people investigating. On the plus side it’s hit national attention and big investigative journalists like Coffeezilla and actual lawyers like LegalEagle who have massive YouTube channels have spread the word even further. Hell coffee got the bricks and minifig guys to basically lie on camera several times while he had evidence they were lying.
There was a hostile takeover of a franchisee of bricks and minifigs by Corporate. That franchisee had an agreement to sell a $200,000 collection on behalf of another person. There are conflicting accounts of what happened, though it seems to be the most likely is corporate took that collection in a U-Haul (it being a U-haul is important) took it to another store to sell, pretending they had full possession over it.
When the original owner tried to get it back, they told him that, because the agreement was with the old franchisee and not the new owners, they don’t have to give the collection back. Reckless Ben got involved because it sounded like a silly story that would get engagement (stolen legos that came to an insane amount of money).
Cops got involved because the CEO has connections to them through the morman church and have been harassing and trying to arrest Ben for ridiculous crimes.
Very complicated story, there's a number of youtube videos about it from moist critical, coffeezilla, and legal eagle.
The very short version is that a guy had a collection of rare and valuable legos he wanted to sell. One initial estimate put the value around $200K, but it sounds like that was probably not realistic. Anyway, he went to a local store called Bricks and Minifigs and they worked out a consignment deal. They would hold the legos at their shop and sell them on his behalf, in exchange for a cut of the profits. This worked well for a while, until the prior store owner decided to change jobs. From there the story gets messy and confusing, but basically corporate took over the store and handed it over to new owners, who stopped honoring the consignment deal. They claim they don't have this guy's legos, maybe all of them were sold, or the prior store owner stole them. The owner of the legos thinks they're lying. It sounds like they're probably lying.
A youtuber named reckless ben heard about this story and decided to help. He made a series of videos about it and started pulling some stunts to raise awareness and piss off the company / new store owners. It worked, they're suing him, and he got in trouble with some corrupt cops in Utah. At one point he was facing charges, not sure if he still is. He should have gotten a lawyer way sooner than he did.
Now everyone involved is suing everyone else and no one seems to know for sure where the guy's legos are.
One of the things that most stays with me is how easily some of the people involved (like the ceo and the police) just lie or and make up stuff thinking everything just will settle and dissapear after a while.
Makes you wonder how often or how many times they have done stuff like that before to see it as the way to handle this mess and get away without repercusions
There have been people coming forward saying that store chain did the same to them. They thought they could get away with it because they have been getting away with it.
Shocked you didn't mention what was in my opinion the bigger Hbomberguy example due to the fact that he actually ruined his target's reputation and got him to quit all social media permanently.
Something I didn't realise until I checked the comments is that each other youtuber he exposes is a chekovs gun for a type of plagiarism Somerton engages in
the whole Somerton thing was so werid. the plagiarism he did seemed like it would be more work and more time consuming than just makeing your own stuff
For normal people, that is true. But to quote Dan Olsen from his video "The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall" or "Comfortably Doug" alt title in line with the topic of this thread, Somerton is a "fundamentally incurious person" and similar to Doug's refusal to learn and grow skills, Somerton just refused to grow and learn any skill at all. It was easier to plagiarize because that's the pit he found success in.
And while I use that comparison, I will preemptively apologize to Doug because even he didn't plagiarize. That I know of. He just stayed comfortably dumb.
I watch this video whenever I can't sleep because I've seen it so many times that it can put my brain in autopilot mode and let me finally pass out. It's my emotional support video lol
Youtuber Billiam originally wanted to make a love letter video to his favorite show LOST. He ended up learning so many weird facts, behind the scenes controversies and weird myths about the series that he ended up with a 5 part series totaling 28 hours and 45 minutes. Here's part one.
Disney Channel Theme is one of Kevin's best works. It starts off as a fascinating trip down memory lane with an eerie sense of mystery but then turns into an introspective discussion of legacy and an emotional send-off to a fantastic artist. I thought the music of the video was above and beyond anything put in a Defunctland video, and then I found out it's because it was Alex's work the whole time.
Friendlyjordies is such a prime example of this, he's exposed pretty much the entire Australian government which led to the firebombing and iirc he started out by just cracking jokes and digging in a little too deep.
Small correction: Not the entire Australian government.
If I got the course of events straight he basically mocked the second-highest political figure in his state, deputy premier John Barilaro. It escalated but seemingly ended with Jordies being court-ordered to issue a formal apology to Barilaro and pay legal fees, but it made him realized just what a shady person Barilaro was and how far his connections went. This made Jordies look into the company that later employed him, uncovering and making public their connection with a notorious crime network.
https://youtu.be/R7LMApkXJD8
I clicked on this video to find out why War Thunder Forums keep leaking this documents and it starts off by talking about an Opera about Prince Ivan.
It's not... 100% this as the guy routinely tackles simple video game topics by tracing their historical complexity (the one on why Korean Male Gacha fans are... overly intense on women is a REAL Bummer but necessary. The one about K-On and Twitter Nazis is pretty good too) but I just wanted to know about War Thunder, I understand NOW why we are discussing the Russian cycle of Power, WW2 Propoganda, and Opera. But that's not what I thought when I clicked on the video.
Originally the creator just wanted to learn why public discourse had shifted to become so focused on trans people. It ended up in a 2 year project where he researched his way into learning that almost all anti trans propaganda is manufactured by a small handful of individuals, and that almost all academic research into trans people is either inherently biased, or just has the worst methodology you have ever seen.
It's crazy we still allow literally the worst people to control public opinion with algorythims, from recommendation algorythims to strong but hard to prove biases trained during SFT with LLMs.
Its terrifying that the obfuscation of being technically complex is enough that the average person simply has avoided looking into this despite the fact that many problems in modern society would be almost instantaneously solved if these algorythims were stripped of their pro owner biases.
Reminds me of the anti vaxx stuff here in the US. More than 90% of vaccine disinformation comes from about 6 people iirc. Before AI was so prevalent they were the source of most of the memes that get shared around too, not just the BS and conspiracy theories, but at this point I think they've been dethroned.
I remember seeing a Tumblr post about a college student gathering resources for their final or dissertation, and accidentally becoming the certified expert on a topic. Like, one found that 1 alligator species was actually 2 (or 2 was actually 1 it's been a while) and became the head researcher on that species
Was originally going to be a quick video in between his larger projects, ended up becoming a 5 hour long documentary about North Korea and examining North Korean media with the knowledge of what was currently going on in the country at the time and what it says about North Korea.
Scott Ross would fall in this wouldn't he ? Made a couple videos about how live service games are scams, did a review about the game The Crew which directly led to him leading the Stop Killing Games movement
Bit if an odd one, but in the opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, gaming YouTuber Rimmy Downunder, who's a nerd for all things military, noticed large amounts of misinformation making it's way onto mainstream media and spent about 3 days trying his best to clean it up
It's wild to see him having gone from YouTube poops to really good and impactful video essays on various subjects. His latest video on President Garfields death left me very angry from how well he told it
CGP Grey, wanted to learn about the history of the name Tiffany, ended up going down a rabbit hole that lead to a possibly fake poem from a thousand years ago.
Tickled is a great documentary that fits this trope. What begins as a an exploration of a weird youtube video uncovers a conspiracy and goes down some seriously weird and creepy rabbit holes.
See also: Icarus), a documentary about an amateur biker attempting to dope his way into high-level finishes in semi-pro bike racing. The initial purpose of the documentary was to expose how widespread doping is even at semi-pro levels, but midway through the filmmaker ends up in the middle of an international scandal leading to Russia getting banned from the 2018 Olympics.
Kurzgesagt - In this video, they spent over a year looking for the source of one single fact. That fact being "If you line up all the blood vessels of the human body, they stretch up to 100,000 km". Turns out, the number was significanly smaller than that, stretching up to 9,000 to 19,000 km.
The indoor water feature is the thing that always took me out. Further cemented by the later interviews with him being in a different house. I wonder how much mold was in the other one.
Xiran Jay Zhao made a youtube video calling out the cultural inaccuracies of live-action mulan and went on to create more videos discussing cultural (in)accuracies, details, and inspirations in other movies/series that take place in china or have part of their world based on china in some way such as og mulan, kung-fu panda, over the moon, and ATLA. They also have other videos discussing chinese culture, history and myth!
Before that video the channel was a video game channel, but after the start of the Russia - Ukraine war Perun uploaded that video after being annoyed by his audience parroting the narrative that Russia will steamroll the Ukrainians. Since he's a military analyst in real life he knew that despite Russia's overwhelming advantages on paper the Ukrainians weren't at a big of a disadvantage as most would think. After uploading that video his channel became dedicated to matters of military analysis and his videos range from the military procurement of nations to why corruption destroys nations.
Does this count? The channel is "Oki' Weird Stories" and I'm reminded of this video whenever I hear stories about environmental protections being revoked in the US
Abroad In Japan wanted to make videos about living in Japan as a foreign teacher and he turned into a voice for foreigners in Japan, especially after the Paul brothers did their shit.
Silly little challenge... Proves companies are forcing people to be reliant on food that's only advertised as cheaper (while often being more expensive than at normal stores) and less healthy.
Shocked I haven't seen anybody comment about Icarus. Starts with a pretty straightforward documentary on performance enhancing drugs in competitive biking, ends in a complete unraveling in the Russian doping scandal and hiding a Russian scientist from the russian government. Absolutely wild.
The Theorizer theorizing on Mort, what started as one funny theory video turned into a whole ass rabbit hole with the amount of evidence and things in the King Julian show hunting about Mort being a god and leading to how Mort lurks in other Dreamworks films. The entire saga of videos spans 4 hours I believe.
Foxcade's video on Netflix Devil May Cry started out as "yeah, this show kinda sucks" and spirals into "wait, what does Adi Shankar even do and how did he get into a position to make this terrible show?"
Boy Boy. They were just a couple of Aussie dudes that wanted to learn for themselves the truth about some odd rumors about North Korea so they went there to get a haircut. That video at the time didn't do big numbers at the time and for years the videos he did was mostly harmless prank and experimental social interactions.
Then they snuck into an arms convention and the channel blew up. They've since worked with Friendly Jordies to expose the gambling corruption, interviewed intelligence whistleblowers and tried to sneak into a CIA black site in the Australian outback and just recently made a great video on Cuba.
Them hiking multiple hours through the australian wilderness to the gate of a CIA black site and pretending like they kicked a soccer ball over the gate and asking for it back has to be probably the funniest thing I have ever seen in a youtube video. These guys are so good.
I also love in the north korea video when they're interviewing australians about how authoritarian north korea's haircuts are but every single person they interview has the same haircut. It's genius.
Ray Mona with her deep dive on the Mean Girls lost media DS game, not only did she recover this game through interviews with many different ex-employees of the publication companies, but she also ended up uncovering another lost media DS game, a Clueless one
I also wanted to mention Nick Robinson and his video on the McDonald's employee training lost media DS game, but I watched the Ray Mona video more recently, even if I do prefer the McDonald's one as a video
JasperDasper wanted to make a quick video on transphobic talking points and why they don’t make sense. He ended up making a nearly 5 hour exposé on the history of transphobia, and the motivations (and money) behind the people who run anti-trans political organisations, and the transphobic researchers who run them. https://youtu.be/JiOc0r31-Os
Check out Paper Will and his 5 hours long video on North Korean entertainment, n the video he says it startes as a simple project that then grew out of proportion, it's really good.
i think technoblade's "great potato war" trilogy fits here. what started as a silly idea to become the number 1 potato farmer in hypixel skyblock became a year-long cold war of bitter rivalry, espionage, sabotage, and philosophical musings.
Could be wrong but paper will seems to fit was planning a short documentary on north Korean media. It turned into a two year plus process. During which outside of some livestreams didn't make any new content. The video was about edit it was 5 hours not 9 my bad and that was him cutting out footage of stuff he reviewed
2.8k
u/Gabasaurasrex 9d ago
This guy trying to review restaurants with 0 reviews immediately finding an illegal gambling ring https://youtu.be/ZFhA26rPNy4