So I think we already know the outlines of the typical criticisms of Breadtube, namely that it's vaguely-leftist content that focuses on cultural critique and gives a nod to socialist theory here and there but it doesn't actually achieve anything and it's just a media-consumption demographic with no moves towards anything that resembles on the ground organising and activism. (Obviously there are a few outliers but as a rule this generally holds true.)
I dipped out of Breadtube years ago for plenty of reasons but I just posted on Lemmygrad criticising the SPD Three Arrows movement which prompted me to have a look at the Breadtuber Three Arrows and they have done exactly the same thing that Contrapoints and a lot of other large figures in this genre have done:
They build up a healthy Patreon base and then their content drops off to like a couple of videos a year, if that, while continuing to draw off a personal salary which rivals that of a full-time worker.
In the past two years Three Arrows has produced 4 videos, amounting to less than 4.5 hours of runtime all up.
That's staggering for someone who is getting over 60k a year, at the most conservative estimate.
Likewise Contrapoints claimed to be getting 20k a month and she's putting out like 1-2 videos a year. And there's plenty of other examples of this too.
Imagine what could be done if people supported their local grassroots organisations instead of paying boatloads of cash for their twice-yearly YouTube treats smh.
I guess I'm trying to say I don't understand how it's a grift? Again, I don't watch any of them but it doesn't seem like these youtubers are scamming or manipulating their viewers and people are voluntarily donating money to support them. The fans can also cancel their donations at any time if they're unhappy with the amount of content the youtuber is putting out
I feel like if the youtubers were making apolitical content this post wouldn't have been made, and it's only because they're making "socialist" content that makes it feel like a grift because there's a higher standard assigned to it. Whether that standard is morality, expectations of helping the working class, etc.
Idk it's 4AM and I ate 1 meal today I might not be thinking straight or making any sense haha
I think that I'm making a subtle conceptual distinction here between a grift and a scam which is why we aren't on the same page.
Astrology is a grift while Young Living is a scam imo. An astrologer is going to work hard to draw up a birth chart for you and to develop a report based on interpreting this chart and they'll provide you with a personalised consultation explaining all of this. It's hard work. But it's a grift because ultimately it's selling bullshit.
Young Living is an MLM that scams sellers out of money and sells overpriced essential oils with bogus health claims and fearmongering.
In a grift, people are still getting what they are paying for but in a scam it's ripping people off blind. An insurance scam is selling people a policy that is essentially nonexistent whereas the insurance industry itself is a grand societal grift under capitalism, if that makes sense.
So a YouTuber grift would be to foster parasocial relationships to cash in on them or to do anti-tankie content or to go down the tried-and-true "Why I left the left" route. All of them take varying degrees of hard work to pull off but ultimately it's peddling convenient bullshit. That's why I think this falls into grift territory; Keffals is on an anti-tankie, why I left the left grift. She scammed people out of donations towards her non-existent "legal fund".
Absolutely.
I really don't bother to turn my attention towards liberals much, beyond what is forced into my attention, because I don't believe that they deserve my time.
It's also worth noting that I'm speaking about what I know. I'm really not familiar with other content creators besides Breadtube except for that which is implicitly materialist (e.g. Citations Needed, Radio War Nerd) or explicitly Marxist. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is representative of a larger trend but I'm completely unfamiliar with the rest of it so it's not my place to speak about it.
Ultimately if liberals are grifting and getting grifted I'm going to laugh or shake my head and that's about as far as I'll go with it. If there are scams I feel an obligation to denounce them regardless of where they come from because of the nature of them. But at the same time, if there's a grift on the left then I feel like I have an obligation to speak out against it because it's something that exploits people who are important to me so you're right in that there is a moral imperative here but it's less about the fact that I'm assigning higher standards to the creator themselves and more because I'm assigning a higher importance to the people who are/could be targets of the grift.
Ah I understand now, you've explained it really well
BreadTube is totally grifting Western leftists