curated: the implosion of Channel Awesome

I’ve seen the edges of it for a while now. I’ve seen a few videos by the crew, although Lindsay Ellis is the one I’ve watched the most of, especially after she left CA and found a voice that’s more distinct from Doug Jones’ show.

I wasn’t familiar with the depth of the accusations though. Yikes.

I knew they were kind of incompetent and skewy. (I knew that Allison
Pregler was fired for daring to forget to hang up a skype call), but this is
worse than i imagined.

I’m kind of glad that i lost
interest in Doug’s staff quite some time ago: While other
CA-Contributors (A lot of them I still watch) developed their style and evolved over
time, he never really did.

If you read the Encyclopedia Dramatica articles on everybody involved, many of these allegations seem plausible, if you read between the lines. (I’ve heard that the EDnik who wrote those entries was actually a former CA contributor.)

Now that we have this 60+ page document (which I read all the way through) and ED was proven more-or-less right – the Walker brothers see themselves as the real center of attention, and at the start the two egomaniacs hired a horrendous “CEO” in the form of Mike Michaud, together they tried to scoop up every pop-culture reviewer in Blogville and YouTube. They (Michaud, Mike Ellis, Bhargav Dronamraju, and the Walkers) either realized they can’t handle all this talent, so they are just riding the tiger of ad money for as long as it will last, or they are just that willfully incompetent. Their inability to communicate with their content producers kept their unpaid “employees” from realizing how bad it really was. What pushed things to a head is the “corporation’s” unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, and the double bind the Walkers’ are in with Michaud; he owns the intellectual property rights to the Nostalgia Critic character, so if they fire him, he takes the Critic away, and Rob no longer can play his dumb “Santa Christ” character. That counts more than all the people they conned into producing work for their rickety mess of a website, so losing Noah “Spoony” Antweiler, Lindsay “(no longer) the Nostalgia Chick” Ellis, Dan “Foldable Human/Folding Ideas” Olson, Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug, Kaylyn “MarzGurl” Saucedo, (and many others) means very little to the leadership after getting anywhere from four to nine years of free work out of these people. The suicide of Justin “JewWario” Carmical only counted in Mike Michaud’s eyes as a way of wringing views (“Dr. Gonzo’s” claim within the document) out of fans. Mike Ellis is gone, Bhargav Dronamraju quit after the 2011 “film” Suburban Knights, it’s now the Walkers (with Rob handling most of the contact with producers because Michaud speaks to nobody below the Walkers’ level – at one point his brother Greg was talking for him to the content producers. If it was only bad management, that would be enough to sink a company, but the endless allegations of sexual harassment and other greasiness should drive the nails into the coffin lid.

I don’t think he has to evolve since, IMO, the quality of his videos are consistently above all the other contributors on Channel Awesome or the former TGWTG.

Nah, Lindsay Ellis is way better.

Big deal. Nothing to see here. Tired of hearing from losers in the work force these days. Nobody is freaking keeping you there!!! If you dont like something, get the hell out and shut up. “Ehh i worked somewhere, and they didnt fulfill my every dream, fantasy, and whim! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” typical millenial garbage.

I doubt you actually read their allegations, unless you’re naturally incompetent at critical thinking? One of the employees who were fired because of taking rest ONE DAY after surgery was barred from working in the same industry for three years, resulting in her losing control of her life, her friends, family, and was basically unemployed.

You also must not have experienced being dirt poor, and/or under the mercy of employers who tie tight ropes around their employees. You have any idea how difficult it is to get a job nowadays? Get back under the rock from which you live in, mate, we don’t need your useless input in today’s economy.

Perhaps if one person was claiming allegations against CA, your comment could be plausible. Unfortunately, if you’ve seen the document and if you’ve heard about why so many producers left the online site, it’s obvious that there was more than one person who suffered abuse, lack of compensation, etc. If you read further through the document, you’ll even see some people who suffered sexual harassment and even grooming?

This is more than a one person kind of thing, I hope you realize?

extreme SJW community.

LOL.

To be clear, Argol is referring to someone who received death threats for criticizing a rape joke as “whiny and entitled.”

You need to come up with something better than screaming the SJW buzzword if you want to support your point.

Lindsey is probably doing some of the best film critique on the web today.

Fucking lol:

https://i.imgur.com/UATsJfT.png

Aww, I love you, too.

Not that kind of fucking.

“If you read the Encyclopedia Dramatica articles…”

I’m gonna stop you right there.

It’s worse than that. It’s like the Platonic ideal of the non-apology: “I’m sorry you didn’t like what I did” rather than “I’m sorry for what I did”.

Someone else made the same mistake on Twitter. It happens.

How do you see these figures about a channel?

Thanks!

Oh, I know. My LOL was sarcastic and bitter, a response to the idea that it requires extreme SJWness to think those things are uncool.

To whom is this addressed, and why?

Small, but accelerating. A ten year old site losing one percent of its members in three days is significant, especially if it keeps up. And their non-apology “we’re sorry you’re upset” statement just pissed off even more people.

what makes you think it won’t be affected?

Here’s the irony you may not have appreciated: All you care about is the things you like. But if the people who make the things you like feel they’re being mistreated — or if they’re assholes who mistreat others so that no one wants to work with them — then the things that you like stop getting made.

Maybe the lesson here is that to get the things we like, we have to care about how the people who make those things are treated, and support them when they ask to be treated better.

there wasn’t a new Nostaliga critic episode posted yesterday, hence resentment.

It’s possible that how real human beings are treated is more important than you getting a new episode of your favorite thing.

I can’t control how anyone is treated.

Not directly. But content creators want YOUR eyeballs, and their advertisers want YOUR money, so you do have power. If you care about how they treat their people, you can threaten to withhold your views or your dollars until they do better.

But that’s only if you care, of course. If you don’t want to be a good citizen or a good neighbor, and you just want to be a consumer, then I can’t help you there.

I’m a “real” human being

Given the sentiments you’ve displayed, I think you may have actually used those quotation marks correctly. Well done.

Again, nothing criminal alleged? They were just mean? Boo hoo hoo, seriously.

So the law has to have been broken before mistreated people earn your sympathy? Coolcoolcool. Glad you weren’t around when slavery was completely legal.

again self-interest and I have no moral problem with that.

Got it. You do you. If you’re ever laid off for missing a day of work because you’re recovering from surgery, don’t expect anyone here to shed any tears for you.

Lindsay is atrocious unless you’re are a high octane, cancerous SJW.

Wow, what insightful commentary!

I see the incel contingent has arrived

You can not support endeavors that treat people badly.

To be fair nobody in Channel Awesome was ever talented or funny.