Bait (Patreon)

There's a Youtube Channel called Michael Does Life, and it seems simple enough. Angry video gamer angrily rants about every new video game that comes out… angrily.

You've seen these channels before, only you haven't.

Because Michael Does Life is the world's biggest troll and its beauty is being tarnished by the reason so many otherwise intelligent people take the bait, and in stride.

Every 3-4 months, I see a tweet of somebody cropping images from Michael's channel and tweeting…

"What the hell is this channel?"

"Gamers are stupid."

"People just hate everything!"

The image in question is usually something like this…

And you just wonder how people fall for this? The repetitive titles. The red text. The buzz words.

It even extends into the videos themselves.

"And you should be thanking me, world class veteran video game critical Michael Does Life, because without me, this game wouldn't have happened, I guarantee you that."

How?

How?

Do you hear this quote from a man like this and think "Christ… angry gamers, amirite?" How can you not see this for the blatant troll it is? How do Youtubers who deal with trolls every single day in their comment section, not detect this?

Well, I've got a theory.

Likes.

Twitter is all about making bite-sized content that earns a chuckle for two seconds, and is forgotten three seconds after switching your phone off, but makes you feel good when that person who's forgotten about your post left a like.

So you're scrolling through YT one day and you find a channel that baffles you. How can one person make such repetitive content day in and out that's so negative? Actually that's a lie, you probably didn't even ask that question. You likely just came to a conclusion that's widely accepted, gamers are assholes and ruin everything.

Your tweet pretty much just says that, and you get thousands of likes by people who are just as baffled as you, and have done even less questioning. So when a couple people come along and tell you that you've been played and this entire channel is meant to bait people exactly like you saying things exactly like this…

Nuh uh.

He's just a toxic gamer, and I’m in the right, and I know this, because thousands of people liked my post.

We live in a world where you can be completely wrong, and are not only contributing to the toxic culture, but doing so exactly how the troll wants you to, and you don't care, because you got likes, a metric that is utterly meaningless in every single capacity but what it means to you.

And it clearly means a lot to people, for they'd seemingly rather give up a limb before deleting a Tweet that's ignorant but got attention.

You see this all the time with the sort of people who are enemies to the type of people that fall for Michael's bait. They'll make some shitty comment about a female character, people rail them and quote tweet them to score points for their own audience, and the person who was so "owned" has gained thousands of followers and will sleep soundly knowing he got more likes on that post than anything else he ever said in his life.

That is how emotionally fragile we are.