The Wasted Potential of Leafy

youtube terminating leafy's channel has sparked quite a lot of debate in the community while to some it was reason for celebration to others his ban was seen as setting a precedent dangerously infringing on freedom of speech well to me personally it's neither one or the other while i don't think anyone should celebrate a fellow youtuber getting banned the argument that youtube is moving the goal posts and it's the beginning of the end for all of us in my opinion doesn't have a leg to stand on with a situation like this i think it's important to not just look at it in black and white because this is not a question of do we or do we not like leafy rather the question becomes was his permanent ban justified is this a case of censorship on youtube and should all youtubers be afraid moving forward so uh put on your smart hats and get ready for some smart content because there's quite a lot to look at with this situation also this video is brought to you by nordvpn but we're going to talk about it more at the end of this video i feel like most of the time creators are justified in complaining about youtube's actions but it's never quite as simple as youtube being the almighty god ignoring the voices of the people who power their platform and smiting down random accounts just for shites and giggles youtube's decision making is highly dependent on two external factors with one hand they're trying to keep advertisers happy without which the platform could not possibly sustain itself and with the other youtube tries to avoid regulation from lawmakers who will not rest until they put constraints on these huge social platforms they don't even fully understand and all the way out here away from all the big people in suits trying to co-exist in some fragile harmony there's us the creators between 30 to 50 million people who are uploading content to their channels but as we've seen multiple times it's enough for just one creator to cross a line for this harmony to completely crumble whether that means advertisers getting upset and everybody's income getting cut in half or regulators seizing their chance to put youtube in a corner with stuff like article 13 or kappa and again all of us have to suffer as a result after leafy got terminated quite a few relevant figures in the community jumped to defend him for example scarce tweeted out even if you weren't a fan of his videos levy's termination is very very concerning leafy being terminated now means any of us could be next faze banks also echoed this sentiment on his podcast the pro censorship like stance is incredibly wacky what these people fail to really understand is that the goal post will continue to be moved the goal post will be moved and listen i respect both scarce and face banks as creators but i think they're either choosing to ignore facts or they've never even read the harassment policy at all [Music] youtube updated their harassment policy long before leafy ever came back to youtube an official statement from 2019 says and i quote harassment sometimes takes the shape of a pattern of repeated behavior across multiple videos or comments even if any individual video doesn't cross our policy line and they list the following set of consequences for repeated harassment getting suspended from the partnership program removing content from a channel issuing strikes or terminating a channel altogether so you see the goal posts didn't move a single inch unfortunately youtube is no longer what it was several years ago we're way past that point i'm not saying i necessarily agree with their harassment policy but it's done it's been sealed it's cut in stone clear as daylight if you upset the ecosystem you will face severe consequences it's been the reality we've been living in since 2019. on top of that leafy says himself that he did get a warning did you have any strikes prior to your channel being terminated because i know you got some in the past but like you complained to youtube and they reversed them so that they made a mistake no i had i had one i think warning but i had no strikes besides that so yeah it's super random dude how is it super random when you acknowledge that you got a warning before that which you chose to ignore and even ramp up the thing they warned you about in the first place now there's the argument that he only used pokeman in the thumbnails but then his videos were talking about something completely different and that's just bogus because not only does it break the clickbait rule but thumbnails are just as much subject to the harassment guidelines as any other part of the content furthermore a thumbnail is only clicked five to ten percent of the time it's being shown so for every let's say one million views a video gets there's roughly 12 million people who saw it but never clicked on it if the picture in the thumbnail is considered harassment it's completely irrelevant what the content is so that's two rules you broke with one stone and that argument falls as for the argument that leafy didn't see this coming that's just a flat out lie for one he can be directly quoted in saying he will not stop until he gets banned i'm assuming at this point some people are wondering when am i going to stop if i had to be honest most likely when i get banned or just complete utter burnout when i have a cow that just keeps producing milk i'm just going to keep milking it until the milk dries up and the cow has been melted to this point of complete utter exhaustion and two any creator who makes even slightly edgy content knows they have to walk a very thin line across a legitimate minefield choosing to ignore that is 100 on you people saying oh leafy come back i would love to see leafy come back and try to exist in the landscape today i'd love to see him succeed in today's climate leafy could have well survived the climate but he made one giant mistake by letting his ego get in the way and losing grip on his priorities by taunting h3h3 with this clip over and over again he placed himself in this cycle of trying to prove ethan wrong and make him look stupid but by pushing the boundary a little more each time and seeing how he was getting away with it he was pretty much like a junkie looking for the next fix always chasing the dragon so instead of making ethan look stupid it just backfired on himself he literally set himself up to be terminated and i have to point out what a waste it is if anything it's just sad that a channel of this size has just gone to waste and what's even more sad in my opinion is how leafy is acting like he doesn't care flexing with the 4 million dollars he supposedly made but meanwhile he cut off the connection to his own audience and sabotaged a large source of his income by sheer vanity and frustration leafy fans will say he doesn't care bro he tricked the system he got his bag and left on his own terms and that's probably the biggest lie he managed to sell to those looking up to him for someone who keeps yapping about the stock market and how financially savvy he is i don't buy for a second that he's just okay with losing direct access to 5 million people to which he could just churn his minimal effort content on a daily basis in order to stay at the top of their consciousness and continue to make banks selling his merch i think not leafy the public persona but calvin vale the grown-ass man behind it i think he knows very well that he could have gone on for a lot longer and he could have made a hell of a lot more than four million dollars and at the end of the day it's just a whole lot of wasted potential [Music] now as far as people's reaction goes here's something else that i don't understand when jake paul was making content for kids that clearly broke a lot of guidelines everybody riled up to condemn his actions nerd city made an entire video based on the specific idea that by virtue of toxic content like the one jake paul was making regulators might crack down on youtube and all of us would have to suffer the consequences well guess what it wasn't long before kappa happened as a result of that with leafy we're looking at the exact same situation a youtuber who made toxic content intentionally dancing too close to the line essentially taunting outside forces to come and crack down on the entire platform how come the same people who are condemning jay paul never said a word against leafy's antics some even defending him it's the same situation just in a different genre commentary in my opinion doesn't mean you can just attack someone to get views i think valuable commentary should be based as much as possible on objective analysis verified facts and a sort of sportsmanship that might allow you to eventually shake hands with the person you're criticizing if you ever met them and i think it's pretty ignorant to think youtube wants to ban free speech by the way realistically i think they're just trying to keep the conversation civil in fact this is what susan wojcicki the ceo of youtube actually said herself the policy has to be written in such a way that creators can comment on each other and criticize each other and and so the question is how do you draw the difference between being part of this free speech and open ideas and um and then like where where do you draw that line where do they cross the line that it's no longer just about ideas but they're criticizing them as a person um and so that's what we're in the process of doing i've been pretty vocal against youtube whenever i've seen them mess up but when the rules are so spelled out and clear-cut i feel like those who are defending leafy are just acting on emotion when in fact all evidence points against him [Music] when faced with the argument that youtube is a private company that can do whatever they want i've seen people respond in a way that to me doesn't make much sense people are acting like if say uber were to ban some of its drivers based on their religion or their political beliefs but that's just not the case at all it's more like uber banning drivers who don't abide by traffic codes if someone chooses to drive the wrong way just to raise chaos uber 100 has the right to ban that person from using their app and youtube's position on this has been very consistent in the past few years whether we look at idubbbz's content cop on leafy or goku naru's video on h3h3 and now with leafy getting banned it's crystal clear that while they're not stifling commentary they've drawn a clear line between attacking a person versus combating ideas and criticizing a creator's actions from that point of view idubbbz's video on leafy does lean pretty heavily on personal attacks goku naru's video brings up a lot of great points about h3h3 but then he goes around and simulates a freaking execution scene at the end of it and by the way some of leafy's criticism in the video that he made about me was very much valid in the video he chose to criticize i was obnoxious and overconfident but the thing is he intentionally picked a video that i had made over two years ago when i was dealing with a sudden giant wave of attention that quite frankly i wasn't equipped to properly handle looking back on that period of time there's parts that are tough for me to watch and it's something that i've talked about very openly before so any legitimate criticism he had for me is invalidated by the amount of malice and envy he regurgitated in his video i think commentary on youtube is an important sort of cleansing mechanism that keeps creators in check it's very healthy for the community to have these types of videos but the moment attacking the person starts to weigh more than combating their ideas you're entering a territory where you're just inviting youtube to come in and put their foot down and that's exactly what happened with leafy now i also want to touch on the fact that after i made my last video on pokeman she came out with a response and i think it's fair to acknowledge that it was a pretty reasonable video for anybody interested in checking it out i've linked it in the pinned comment of my last video as you can see the leafy situation is pretty complex there's so many variables to it that i could probably make maybe like nine more videos on the topic but my thoughts on his band can basically be summed up this way if he hadn't been actively trying to push youtube's buttons and maliciously targeting people against all rules and guidelines i would agree that he was wronged because regardless if you like someone or not when someone gets unjustly censored or deplatformed it's bad news for everybody but in my opinion this was not a case of censorship it's just the case of someone falling on their own ass as a consequence of their own actions but in any case let me know what you think in the comments down below if you agree if you disagree in any way especially for leafy fans i know you're probably going to want to leave dislikes but i'm interested in hearing your actual thoughts even if you're leaving an angry comment as long as it's well argumented i'm looking forward to reading it and while you're typing down there i want to take a quick moment to thank the sponsor of today's video nordvpn you know how when you're in a foreign country you go to search for something and it's not google anymore it's google all the search results are in portuguese or something and you're like how in the freaking hell do i switch back to english well with nordvpn you're never going to have that problem because you can trick the internet into thinking you're anywhere you want in the world so if you're visiting portugal you can use nordvpn to virtually teleport back to your home country not to mention when you use nordvpn your internet provider can no longer track what you're doing this is particularly useful if you're using a public wi-fi like in a cafe where there's always the risk of someone hacking into your phone not 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Channel: undefined

Views: 1,755,521

Rating: 4.681644 out of 5

Keywords: @andreiterbea, andrei terbea, andrei terbea animation, leafy, leafyishere, leafy ban, leafy youtube, leafy twitch, pokimane, twitch, youtube policy, faze banks, keemstar, moving the goalposts

Id: liWAPIiO2IQ

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/StickFigure-]

why is leafy so ugly in the drawing lmfao andrei fucking salty

[u/the-cool-dark-master]

I think leafy attacked andrei because he didn’t animated him

[u/SkiffaPaul]

This is everything wrong with animation on YouTube

[u/the-cool-dark-master]

I kinda liked the video to be honest, except for the h3h3 part

[u/DrFaceHead]

this video fucking sucks

[u/the-end-is-nigh-]

Great video. I actually really like Andrei, aside from the video Leafy criticized because he was acting like a douchebag, which he acknowledged. This man knows how to take criticism, unlike a certain obese Jewish man from LA..

[u/RedSpyOfficial]

GG unlucky

[u/SirShrekTheBrave21]

Andre akdfa;dj is a prick, Leafy exposed his dickheadedness in one of his videos. He has a really arrogant vibe to him as well..

[u/ykys]

I'm copypasting my comment from this video:

you maaaaaaaaay have a little bias with him, anyway...
His ban was concerning, but not the most concerning one, he kinda made it easy for youtube. I'm not sure how much he wanted to stay. While I wish he stayed longer, not gonna say "he's a mad lad, he doesn't care", but I think he made the right decision to do whatever he wanted to do and waiting for the near end. Mostly because he should know that making money this way and entering this "game" is a non productive waste of time. I hope he finds a job he likes. Also, Leafy's content is no way similar to the Paul Brothers and they were also way worse, but they get away with it. Also also, the "malice" that it seems he covers the constructive criticism with, was mostly for comedic effect. One should not expect to use his video seriously for criticism.