YouTroll: How PewDiePie’s Channel ‘Deletion’ Just Made Things Tougher For All YouTube Personalities [Opinion]

Full disclosure: I am not too familiar with the YouTuber known as PewDiePie.

Granted, I know what the popular, Swedish-born gaming personality is famous for, and I’m aware that he was born in Sweden, but other than that, I’m pretty much far out of the realm of his normal viewing audience.

Additionally, although I am not one of his fans, I am also incredibly familiar with the reason why PewDiePie’s name has popped up in many trending topic lists as of late. A few weeks back, as Variety shared, it seemed as if the 27-year-old had become incredibly fed up with the service that allowed him to become famous due to a sudden changing of their “Recommended Videos” pages, which in turn, caused him to lose a high amount of viewers.

As such, PewDiePie promised that once he reached 50 million subscribers, he would delete his channel.

“It seems that YouTube wants to promote random-ass f***ing videos that you don’t give a s*** about,” he groused in a video about his decision. “It feels like a kick in the face when they make changes and don’t tell anyone about it.”

This past Thursday, PewDiePie’s YouTube channel hit the aforementioned kill-switch to its existence, which was an impressive 50 million subscribers. Taking to Twitter to confirm the annotation, the young man revealed that he indeed would be following through on his word to shut it down within the next 24 hours.

https://twitter.com/pewdiepie/status/806981139399405569

On Friday, with the world — or better yet, his fans — watching with baited breath and broken hearts, PewDiePie deleted his YouTube profile, But, it was not the one you’re thinking of. Instead, as We The Unicorns explained, “jack septiceye2,” a second channel created to mock another online gaming personality, jacksepticeye (Seán William McLoughlin), was removed from the site.

“You know when you make a joke and it just blows up bigger than you ever imagined,” PewDiePie, born Felix Kjellberg, states in a YouTube offering posted Friday. “Well, that was the joke.”

Personally, I disagree with what he thinks “the joke” is here, but I temporarily digress.

At the end of the day, considering my non-attachment to him or his channel, PewDiePie’s ploy doesn’t affect me one way or the other, so I’ll refrain from dragging him too much. However, for all of his trolling and bemoaning about something that other notable YouTube stars, such as Philip DeFranco, former CEO of SourceFed, have expressed a true grievance about, he just made it that much harder for anyone connected to the video sharing site to be taken even minutely seriously about any subject.

For example, just recently, queer YouTuber Hartbeat relayed in a heartbreaking video, that was noted by the Inquisitr, that she suffered from schizophrenia. Although fans of hers had known for ages that she dealt with some kind of emotional illness, it was the first time that the brave California native had directly named what she was going through and just how it affected her day-to-day life, including how it restricted her from posting YouTube videos as often as she wanted to.

Because of what PewDiePie just pulled, who’s to say that someone won’t see her video or others like it, and believe that someone is simply making something up solely for the sake of getting more eyes on their channel, and by association, pulling in more subscriptions?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BNpx9fsjnUj/?taken-by=pewdiepie

On top of that, this is not the first troublesome antic that Kjellberg has been attached to this year. In September, as documented by We The Unicorns, he took to his channel to verbally attack 42 — yes, they counted — YouTube names and full-on celebrities for no reason whatsoever. Also that month, he released a “parody” video regarding Marina Joyce, the beauty YouTuber who many have said is dealing with serious drug problems. In August, after losing his verification on Twitter for unknown reasons, he announced that he and JackSepticEye had pledged their allegiance to ISIS (he was temporarily suspended from Twitter after posting the message).

The list goes on and on, with each mention displaying more obvious cries for attention from someone who has been deemed by the media as “the biggest YouTube star in history.” As for what that says about the many others who share their talents, either marginal or massive, through the site, it’s anyone guess, but it doesn’t help them break through the glass ceiling that just got lowered because of PewDiePie’s stunt. A great disservice to the many who flounder through that particular sea of the world-wide-web has been done today.

Congratulations, PewDiePie. I hope you’re happy with yourself because I’m sure there are many others who aren’t right now. Good luck with keeping your relevance.

[Featured Image by John Lamparski/Stringer/Getty Images]