What are your views on music video reactors on YouTube?

Giving bad takes. These are channels that watch the videos, analyze them, and then produce horribly fallacious conclusions. They are your Ben Shapiros, his sis— I mean, Brett Cooper, etc. They are usually the far-right reaction channels, but I’ve seen a few left-wing reaction channels that give equally terrible takes. H3 Productions is one such example. H3 is actually bad on multiple levels, since their reactions are typically done as a group of friends, so the echo chamber of bad takes amplifies a hundredfold.

Channels like these tend to be even more popular than the channels that give bad takes, because if there’s one thing the people of the internet love more than edgy controversy, it’s shallow clickbait.

Enter: Sssniperwolf and xQc. Sssniperwolf’s reactions are so shallow, they do not really transform the copyrighted material in any way. Her reactions basically consist of the occasional gasp and “OMG!”, and that’s about it. She doesn’t analyze, nor does she give any takes at all. Her ‘reactions’ are so predictably shallow, people have even invented games that show off just how non-transformative her reaction channel is.

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Stealing content. The reason why reaction channels are legally permitted at all is because of something called “Fair Use”. Under Fair Use, YouTube channels are allowed to use other people’s copyrighted content without their permission as long as the channel significantly transforms that content in a meaningful way. Otherwise, it’s just stealing content.

xQc is even worse— he doesn’t even react, he seldom even watches the videos. There are streams where he leaves the room completely while the copyrighted video plays in the background. But I guess he’s such a large channel that nobody dares to challenge the fact that he literally steals views from creators.

Giving good takes. Perhaps it’s because good takes tend to be less edgy and controversial, channels that give good takes are typically less popular than the ones that give bad takes. Channels that give good takes often go far more in-depth than any of the other two types of reaction channels, so they are also more likely to lose their audience. People just don’t have the attention span and/or the intellectual acuity to keep up with these deeply analytical takes.

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My view is that reaction channels on YouTube are mostly a waste of time.

For me, there are mainly 3 types of YouTube reaction channels (this applies to all of them, regardless of what kind of videos they’re reacting to):

Because of how unpopular these channels tend to be, they also have a high turnover rate. If they don’t disappear after a few short months, then they turn into either type #1 or #3 channels in order to gain popularity. Or they start producing other types of content.

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Sadly, the vast majority of reaction channels on YouTube fall into categories #1 or #3. Which explains why I hardly ever watch reaction-type content. I have to sift through the garbage of 50+ crappy reaction channels—which the YouTube algorithm tries to shove down my throat first because they’re shoutier and edgier— to find that one golden egg that will probably disappear after 6 months because they lack the views and subscribers to sustain their channel. I just don’t have that kind of time.