Wednesday, December 5, 2018

"Leafywashere" by Thomas Armstrong

           In 2016, millions of people followed the word of a man making gaming commentary videos in his house. Now, only two years later, the name “LeafyIsHere” would bring up stories of drama, clickbait, and more importantly, the question on a lot of people’s minds: where did Leafy go? Not a single new video has been uploaded to Leafy’s YouTube channel since December of 2017, and people are curious as to why. Most people attribute the death of Leafy’s channel to a single video created by a fellow YouTuber; but could one video really bring down a titan like Leafy? Let us explore what happened to the channel of LeafyIsHere.

            Before we can talk about why Leafy fell so far, we first have to explore how he was able to so effectively rise up. Leafy’s YouTube channel shows that it was created in 2011, but the earliest video on the channel was posted in 2013 (Leafyishere 1). Does this mean that Leafy waited 2 years before starting to make videos? Well, actually he did not; Leafy spent that time much like most other YouTubers on the site – making Minecraft videos. In fact, Leafy continued making Minecraft videos until 2015, though he eventually purged all Minecraft videos from his channel; all except for one, which can still be viewed on his channel today. In 2013, Minecraft’s presence on YouTube began to diminish as the game lost its popularity. At that point, Leafy came to the realization that he had two options:
He could continue making Minecraft videos, and ride that trend into the sunset on his very average YouTube channel, and that would be the end of it; or, he could risk everything, and start searching for greener pastures (EmpLemon 1)
It was at this crucial turning point that Leafy showed how hungry he was to be a much larger YouTuber than he was, and he set out to begin growing his channel. He began experimenting with different video formats, games, and even titles. Leafy is credited with starting the trend of videos where the title is in all capital letters and the thumbnail is designed to be eye-catching, for one reason or another.
            Over the next two years, Leafy would focus himself on rebranding his channel in order to grow more down the line. His gaming videos would have a much different tone, especially with his new title and thumbnail format. Also, Leafy would finally begin to dip his toe in the water that would turn out to be the ocean that he would rule: commentary. Actually, he had already made a rant in 2013 about Google+, technically his first commentary video. But the video that really started him down the commentary path was Kids That DDOS, posted in November of 2014 (Leafyishere 1). This video would actually spawn a Kids That DDOS series, which would become very popular on his channel. It also made Leafy realize the potential of commentary videos and split him between those and gaming videos as the content he would continue creating. In 2015, Leafy made his decision to cut gaming videos out in favor of commentaries in order to keep his channel growing. As stated before, it was around this point where Leafy privated all Minecraft videos on his channel, and from this point forward it was all about the rants.
            Now was the time when Leafy would begin rising extremely quickly. By the end of 2015, Leafy was sitting on 500 thousand subscribers (SocialBlade 1); barely two months into the new year, he would hit one million (1); and Leafy would hit his peak in September of 2016, at 4.8 million subscribers (1). Unfortunately, Leafy’s rise would not come without problems. One of the biggest problems was Leafy himself, because he became something he never was, a bully. Gaming videos from Leafy, and even his early rants and commentaries were definitely more light-hearted, if not good natured. It was obvious at times that Leafy was having fun making these videos. Leafy, however, started himself on a darker path by making videos about specific people. He indulged himself in what was called “cringe culture”, essentially making fun of people for being different, or “weird”. This lead to a lot of drama, as Leafy’s videos would often cause harm to the people that he was “roasting”. They would be attacked by Leafy’s ravenous fanbase, consistently hunted because Leafy enabled them to by making fun of the person in the first place. The first major warning sign of this came from the video “THE SADDEST MAN ON YOUTUBE”, a video posted in January of 2016 (Leafyishere 1). This was a video about a small occult YouTuber named MrBlackDarkness666. Leafy’s fanbase immediately set to tearing him apart as usual, but MrBlackDarkness did not take it sitting down like everyone else had. He actually responded in a video where he blamed Leafy for setting his fanbase out to get him, and proceeded to place a curse on Leafy. Both MrBlackDarkness and Leafy eventually ended up on Dramaalert, the YouTube news show run by a man named Daniel Keem, better known as Keemstar. Leafy ended up apologizing to MrBlackDarkness, and that was mostly the end of it. Keemstar and Leafy would continue collaborating as friends as Leafy grew, MrBlackDarkness would return to his own videos, all seemed to be well (although, an interesting side note, MrBlackDarkness never did actually perform the “counterspell” to remove the curse from Leafy).
            Of course, there were still problems. Leafy never learned his lesson. In fact, Leafy remained completely ignorant to the fact that he had set his fanbase on MrBlackDarkness. He claimed that he could not be held responsible for the actions of his fanbase. In any video on Leafy’s channel, the description does have a warning:
*Please don't go out of your way to "witchhunt" anyone that I have talked about in these videos. This channel's purpose is to entertain people and not to spread hate to anyone else's channels. I have no ill will towards anyone I make videos about* (Leafyishere 1)
The only issue with this was that Leafy had not always implemented this. It had been added to the description of his videos only after things had come to a head. Leafy uploaded a video in March (that has since been deleted) about an autistic YouTuber named TommyNC2010. This would cause the largest amount of drama for Leafy that he had ever experienced before. The day that Leafy published the video, TommyNC uploaded his own video not long after that he was receiving death threats and other general hate from Leafy’s fanbase. This resulted in a lot of YouTubers talking about the situation, including Ethan Klein from H3H3 Productions. Ethan uploaded a rant about Leafy, expressing his anger about Leafy bullying people so frequently. Leafy responded with his own rant about Ethan, claiming that he had befriended Leafy not long before attacking him and conspiring against another one of Leafy’s YouTube friends. Both of these videos were soon taken down, but the damage had already been done. Everyone in the commentary community became untrusting of each other. The TommyNC video and Ethan and Leafy’s battle would mark a very important turning point for Leafy’s channel, and the beginning of the hints at his eventual decline. 

       So just when all seemed darkest for Leafy, a familiar figure came to the forefront of YouTube’s attention to take away the heat: Keemstar. A new figure by the name of Ian Carter, better known to the internet as Idubbbz, released the bombshell video title Content Cop: Keemstar. The twenty-two-minute video tearing into Keemstar made him public enemy number one, and Leafy was free from harm – for the most part anyways. But Leafy made a decision that would bite back very quickly: he took advantage of Keemstar’s downfall by stabbing his former friend in the back, making several rants in an attempt to redirect attention away from him completely. But this, along with several other things Leafy had done, including the TommyNC and MrBlackDarkness scandals, would be brought back up in Ian’s Content Cop - Content Cop: Leafy. The video that everyone points to when someone asks, “Where did Leafy go? Why did he quit YouTube?” While the video was not quite as well researched as others, Leafy was already on bad terms with most of the YouTube community, so making it well polished was not necessary in this case. It was more about beating Leafy at his own game; roasting the roaster, if you will. Over time, Leafy would receive less and less views, people would begin unsubscribing, and by December of 2017, Leafy called it quits, and has not returned to YouTube since.
            So that is the end of the story. Content Cop: Leafy destroyed a behemoth of a YouTube channel, and people no longer had to fear a video being made about them by a man sitting in his room, roasting whoever he wanted over gameplay footage. At least, that is what most people would want you to believe. But the story goes deeper than that, so in order to piece it all together, some analysis has to be done. First, the Content Cop series; a recent survey shows that sixteen out of twenty-five people believe that Leafy was killed by the Content Cop that he was the subject of. However, analytics of the seven channels that were subjects of the Content Cops show otherwise. Only Leafy and one other channel could have arguably been “killed” by their individual editions of Content Cop. This does not mean that it is completely impossible, however it is hard to justify that Content Cop could be a “channel killer” with only 2 “confirmed kills”. But analytics are not the most enlightening piece of evidence that Content Cop was not the true killer of Leafy. A much more compelling piece came much later down the line: The Tower Dog Leaks.
            An anonymous user on Twitter under the alias “Tower Dog” posted a tweet detailing 2 major things. First, that Tower Dog had a contact who was offered a position with Google that turned out to be something of a video reviewer. The contact would be given a form with different rules about what a YouTube video could have and not have in it. If any of the rules were broken, the video was to be “demonetized”, meaning that no advertisements could be attached to the video, and no revenue could be earned from said video. This is important because also around this time, YouTubers discovered that demonetized videos would not be sent to the recommended feed of YouTube viewers. Essentially, the video could be seen by current subscribers, but unless someone went looking for the channel, they would not see the video at all. The second major part of the Tower Dog post stated that:
A different contact of mine was involved in the secret meeting with YouTube, which took place around mid 2016 at a Google office in Los Angeles. The meeting had one purpose: to discuss what should be done with unwanted creators on their platform. Some unwanted channel names that were mentioned were Leafyishere, GradeAUnderA, Keemstar/DramaAlert, Scarce and Onision (Tower Dog 1)
So it is obvious that Leafy was on the radar of YouTube’s own executives. But how does this relate to Leafy’s downfall, and the demonetization aspect? Well, there is a final piece of evidence that solidifies what happened: Leafy’s decline started in July of 2016 (SocialBlade 1). 2 months before the Content Cop, and shortly after the alleged meeting. More recently, YouTube’s demonetization algorithm has been running rampant; a lot of YouTubers have had issues with their videos getting demonetized. But such an algorithm did not exist when Leafy was in power. The evidence all points to one fact: Leafy was deemed a threat to the YouTube community, and subsequently it was decided by YouTube executives that Leafy’s channel would be subject to an early, secret version of the demonetization algorithm that exists today. This would stop Leafy’s videos from gaining a place in the recommended feed of many viewers, and would cause an eventual decline of Leafy’s channel that is still ongoing. The Tower Dog Leaks show the means YouTube used to bring Leafy down, and due to the fact that the last video Leafy ever made was published merely three days after the leaks, it is possible that the leak was the straw that broke the back of Leafy. Leafy would call it quits, without even a goodbye to his following.
            Leafyishere to Leafyis…. gone. A titan of a YouTube channel, sunk to the depths by the iceberg he never saw coming. There are still a few major questions about all of this, however: 1) Did Leafy really deserve to be taken down? 2) Were his videos and his community really so bad that YouTube itself felt the need to intervene and cut Leafy and his fanbase off from the rest of YouTube in a desperate attempt to keep the YouTube community from being poisoned? 3) What would happen if Leafy ever came back to making YouTube videos, as if nothing had ever happened? As if the entire thing was some sort of elaborate joke? Well, all of these questions can be answered quite easily. For the first question, the main problem with Leafy was that he never showed any signs of regret about the people he was attacking. Even during the MrBlackDarkness fight, Leafy never could take responsibility for the actions of his fans. Call it the ignorance of young age, or blindness, or whatever you will, but Leafy needed to be aware of the fact that his words had impact on millions of people, whether that impact was positive or negative. If Leafy had simply shown some humility, he might still be around today. But Leafy could not, and so maybe in some way he did deserve to be taken down.
            To the second question, we really need to look at the actions of his fanbase. After all, it has been made perfectly clear that Leafy was ignorant to his actions and his faults. But was everything his fault? His fanbase was the real problem; they attacked people viciously just because Leafy had pointed out their faults. His fans would harass the people that Leafy made fun of everywhere, whether it be Twitter or YouTube or any other social media. The fanbase that Leafy created thrived off of such actions, and in a way, they were like a rabid dog that needed to be cut down. It is quite possible that if Leafy had either put disclaimers in his videos, or even done more general-purpose rants rather than making fun of people as he so often did, maybe his fans would have behaved differently, and things would not have gone as they had. Alas, the course had already been set by Leafy, and his fans would go with him, and once Leafy was lost, so were they.
            Finally, the want of many of his most die-hard fans: Leafy’s return to YouTube. What could possibly happen with such a thing? Well, considering that Leafy never took responsibility for his actions and always resorted to the same thing, it is very likely that Leafy would repeat history, and simply be sailing a doomed ship to the bitter end. But what if Leafy ended up managing to show humility? It is possible for people to change for the better, of course, and Leafy may be no different. However, we may never know, as Leafy himself said in a recent interview with Keemstar:
Maybe I’ll come back, but I don’t know – the landscape just does not like edgy content, and I think that, if I had to bet right now, as time goes on it’s gonna just keep and keep shifting towards safer content. (DramaAlert 1)
             So, we may never know what would happen if Leafy were to come back to YouTube. It 

seems as though Leafy does not believe his content would exactly be welcomed with open arms as it 

had been in the past. All we can do is remember the titan that Leafy became, a mere twenty-year-old 

man, a regular nerd like many others who rose through the ranks. And of course, we can always keep 

and eye out, as his fans most certainly are, for the possible return of Leafyishere.

Works Cited
EmpLemon, “Leafy Was Here | YouTube Geographic”, 20 June 2018
“LeafyIsHere YouTube Stats, Channel Statistics.” Socialblade
“LeafyIsHere.” YouTube
Tower Dog, “YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks + Secret YouTube Meeting”, 9 Dec 2017
DramaAlert, “Leafyishere Interview 2018 - #DramaAlert”, 25 October 2018
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpdK79WVd_M

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