Good content from Dan Brown. Regardless of my personal opinion of him, his opinions, and the choices he's made over the course of his years on Youtube (including Dan 3.0, a failed attempt to have his audience directly dictate his life), Brown has always had an articulate and interesting point of view on whatever subject he chooses to broach. When he speaks about those damaging results, he's speaking from personal experience.
Most of you may not care in the slightest about the allegations going on in the youtube community right now, but they interestingly mirror some of the events occurring in the much more legitimate limelight right now.. It is their mirroring of these events which leads me to share this here.
Youtube is, in many ways - and vlogging especially - a microcosm of our society. While anyone with a video camera can ostensibly be a vlogger, only those with something interesting to say, or an engaging way of saying it, will become popular and widely viewed. This leads to a few problems we see evident in traditional media as well -
1.) extreme views, loudly stated, become viewed in some way as popular.
2.) silver-tongued snake oil salesmen can convince willing masses of just about anything.
3.) the vast swath of the middle opinion has little to no voice.
At least we have wranglers for the Glenn Becks and the Bill Mahers of the world. These popular youtubers gain a power over people which they don't fully comprehend, and don't understand how to control. This leads to the misuse of that power, knowingly or unknowingly. Alex Day's (spurious, imo) claims that he didn't know that he was taking advantage of those he had sex with are similar to the claims made by Jian Ghomeshi that he believed that he was engaging in consentual relations. These people may have said yes at the time, but only because, due to the power of the accused, they felt that they could not say no.
Thoughts, Hubski?