What happens when you stuff millennial online celebrities into an apartment complex? Let's peep this out:
Inside the Hollywood Home of Social Media's Stars. (Don't Be Shy.)
On any given day, something crazy is likely to be happening at 1600 Vine Street, a 550-unit apartment complex in Hollywood. A scary-looking clown might be shimmying across a narrow ledge eight floors above the sidewalk, or a young woman dangling from a balcony while a masked man wields a knife. A husky dog with pink ears, a pony, a baby monkey and other exotic animals also call it home.
But you don't need to live there to experience the high jinks, because they are available for anyone to watch on YouTube, Instagram and whatever social media platform comes next. The building at 1600 Vine functions as dormitory and studio lot for some of the internet's biggest stars. Videos shot there have been watched billions of times. The common spaces — a spacious gym, walkways lined with beige blocks and a courtyard surrounded by lush plants — are so recognizable that it's like walking onto the set of a popular TV show.
The list of current and former residents is a who's who of social media celebrities: the brothers Logan Paul and Jake Paul, Amanda Cerny, Juanpa Zurita, Lele Pons and Andrew Bachelor, known as King Bach. Some are comedians, some are models, and some are famous for being famous. But all are so-called influencers, social media speak for people with a huge digital audience.
1600 Vine offers a peek into the booming ecosystem of these social media stars. As in any caldron of attention seekers who live and work together in the same building, it's an atmosphere rife with cliquishness, jealousy, insecurity and the social hierarchy of high school, except everyone knows precisely how popular (or unpopular) you are. And it's amplified by the fact that influencers can become millionaires with a following on a par with any movie star's. Joshua Cohen, a founder of Tubefilter, a site that tracks the online video industry, described the talent at 1600 Vine as a modern-day version of the Brat Pack or the Mickey Mouse Club.
[...] Calling 1600 Vine home is still no guarantee of influencer status. It also breeds a certain kind of cliquishness and backbiting. Gregg Martin, a young actor who has landed bit roles in TV series including "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," said he felt the building's stars looked down on him. He has 44,000 Instagram followers. "That's considered laughable for most people here," he said. "People kind of look at you and just see the numbers." One influencer told him that he was following too many people on Instagram. It made him seem desperate. "I thought he was joking," he said. "But he was dead serious."
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Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not
Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg. Another day an anonymous donor set up an $86 million Bitcoin-fortune charity called the Pineapple Fund. A Tesla was spotted with a BLOCKHN license plate. There's a surge in people looking to buy Bitcoin on their credit cards. After the Long Island Iced Tea company announced it would pivot to blockchain, its stock rose 500 percent in a day.
In 2017, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin went from $830 to $19,300, and now quivers around $14,000. Ether, its main rival, started the year at less than $10, closing out 2017 at $715. Now it's over $1,100. The wealth is intoxicating news, feverish because it seems so random. Investors trying to grok the landscape compare it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when valuations soared and it was hard to separate the Amazons and Googles from the Pets.coms and eToys.
The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tightknit group of friends — developers, libertarians, Redditors and cypherpunks — who have known each other for years through meet-ups, an endless circuit of crypto conferences and internet message boards. Over long hours in anonymous group chats, San Francisco bars and Settlers of Catan game nights, they talk about how cryptocurrency will decentralize power and wealth, changing the world order. The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the Bitcoin wealth is held by men [archive], and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.
There are only a few winners here, and, unless they lose it all, their impact going forward will be outsize.
They also remember who laughed at them and when.
Related: 1600 Vine Street (similar story, we'll see if it makes you just as mad)
YouTube is shaving off more of the smaller channels from its monetization program:
YouTube is tightening the rules around its partner program and raising the requirements that a channel/creator must meet in order to monetize videos. Effective immediately, to apply for monetization (and have ads attached to videos), creators must have tallied 4,000 hours of overall watch time on their channel within the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers. YouTube will enforce the new eligibility policy for all existing channels as of February 20th, meaning that channels that fail to meet the threshold will no longer be able to make income from ads.
Previously, the standard for joining YouTube's Partner Program was 10,000 public views — without any specific requirement for annual viewing hours. This change will no doubt make it harder for new, smaller channels to reach monetization, but YouTube says it's an important way of buying itself more time to see who's following the company's guidelines and disqualify "bad actors."
[...] The new, stricter policy comes after Logan Paul, one of YouTube's star creators and influencers, published a video that showed a dead body in Japan's Aokigahara forest. Last week, YouTube kicked Paul off its Google Preferred ad program and placed his YouTube Red original programming efforts on hold.
Anyone under 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 total hours watched annually would probably be making a pittance anyway. This change could allow YouTube to put more human eyes on the unruly but popular channels, so it can censor suicide forest vlogs (NSFW) in record time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday January 01 2018, @08:03PM (6 children)
Unless there's video of some neckbeard setting up a systemD-free beowulf cluster, why would I care?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 01 2018, @08:05PM (4 children)
This is what the tech industry gave to mankind. This is the final frontier.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday January 01 2018, @09:17PM (3 children)
We have a word for that: "Sewer"
I have to say, this is the first story I've actually been disappointed Soylent put up. Compared to some of the ones it didn't put up, this is utter garbage. Compared to a decent story... well, you really can't do that, because this is pure sewage.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 01 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday January 01 2018, @11:57PM
khallow is my SoyBook homie.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @10:56PM
do almost rhyme :)
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @12:54AM
"the brothers Logan Paul and Jake Paul, Amanda Cerny, Juanpa Zurita, Lele Pons and Andrew Bachelor, known as King Bach."
Yup...don't know any of these "stars" AND don't care.
King Bach: wannabe somebody?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @09:19PM
So it is the social media equivalent of pointng a camera at its own output screen and flling it with feedback.
And just as full of meaning.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday January 01 2018, @09:22PM
Not sure if this is the script or the journal of the building superintendent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante) [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 01 2018, @09:31PM (1 child)
Um... Never heard of them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:21PM
lol xD [npr.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by ealbers on Monday January 01 2018, @09:37PM
Losers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @10:07PM (3 children)
If I wanted to read about millennial morons, I'd be on Facebook or Instagram. Improve your content or lose your readers...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @12:56AM
This is the first article I'd agree is a wtf.
A just. Don't. Care article.
But....happy new year!!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:55AM (1 child)
All I would have had to do is reframe the summary to bash YouTube a bit, and maybe quote different paragraphs from the article, and most of you would have let all your hate out at the target instead of the article.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:54PM
Damned whiners!
I thought we were all about destroying the legacy media monopolies around these parts.
Newsflash for whiners: you sitting on your ass whining doesn't change anything. While I don't give a crap about their content these people are at least doing something.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday January 01 2018, @11:14PM (2 children)
Personally I can't care less about influencers, and I'd rather have only tech related stories on SN.
But, there is one interesting data point to get out of the TFS: those "celebrities" are partners, share the same space.
Either there is a cursus honorum for influencers, or worse, they became big influencers because they get into some system.
Which gives a lot of credit to the idea that many people with a big following are tools of propaganda like old school celebrities. Still not news but worth considering.
Genuine influencers should be distributed more evenly... and hate each other.
Genuine influencers videos are different from the pap youtube pushes on you at startup. Have you looked at those megaviewers clips? I did not, but the thumbnails seem to come out from the same graphic studio, fake, oversaturated, oversharpened, red circled, sensationalist sh!t.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday January 01 2018, @11:44PM (1 child)
Well, we do need our two minutes' hate discussions and it's no longer fashionable to bash Microsoft. And everybody is recovering from their hangovers today anyway.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @12:59AM
Bash bash bash!
And no hang over here.... Bummer, kind of, lol.
Always fashionable to bash crap like Microsoft!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 04 2018, @07:36PM
We're making some terrific videos at the White House, folks. pic.twitter.com/qsMNyN1UJG [t.co] #TrumpTV [twitter.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:05PM
Sounds like the Black Mirror episode about Yelp-like social media ratings [wikipedia.org], complete with weird psychological dystopia.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?