The Very Online Show 08: Family Vlogging Biz

"My wife" will never not be funny

Well this was depressing, genuinely though thank you for making it.

I had no idea we'd already reached this point.

I've felt anger and/or disgust at some of the videos they've shown the past couple of episodes, but holy shit were the clips and titles of the videos in this one horrible. All of them are either child abuse, clickbait for pedophiles, or both. Exceedingly grim stuff, but thanks to the crew for the deep dive. Can't wait to see what other well of unrelenting darkness they lower Bakalar into next time.

Man, this is the kind of episode I wish was free, this was incredibly informative and should be shared. Thanks guys.

@allthedinos: Right. The video in the first 10 minutes made me feel like throwing up. Absolutely awful, I am tearing up imagining doing that to my kids.

This is the first GB video my wife has ever watched. I explained the concept of TVOS and that this was about family vloggers, she follows one, but ever since that vlogger went to Disney World as part of Disney's marketing campaign for it's reopening from covid last year she's been enjoying it less and less and has started following people who make videos commenting/snarking on popular family vloggers (the snarker blurs out the faces of the kids involved). She told me a few days ago about how a few years ago that vlogger was on a vacation in Hawaii when a fan/vlogger who lived in HI followed her on IG and found her in person, i.e. stalked her, a few months later that smaller vlogger left HI and moved a few miles away from the more famous vlogger and they do collaborations together. One of the things about that vlogger that's gotten my wife pissed was when one of the vlogger's sons got hurt in their pool, then defended herself that she was watching them, but had previously mentioned she was recording a video inside the house at the time of the fall, leading people to wonder which one is it, was she at the pool or recording inside. All in all I'm happy to have watched this with my wife as I think it might be what gets her to stop watching.

When the woman told her kid to "act like you're crying and put your head here", I just closed the video.

that baby in that one video is stupid. what a bad baby.

This is some fucked up shit.

The family reading the mean tweets however read to me like they were sitting down as a family to mock the idiots writing the bad comments which could be seen as a good way to teach the kids how to deal with negative comments online. But the fucked up part is to put the children in that position to begin with...

I can't even bring myself to watch this!

This just absolutely sucks. I know this stuff is out there but it's so unpleasant to see the depths of it. This show is always an amazing watch, though.

This show is my favorite thing on the internet right now

@laezsugam: Unique Selling Point.

Good lord this stuff is absolutely disgusting.

Narcissistic sociopaths are not great people, as evidenced by so many of these family vloggers. It's crazy that this is even a thing.. It's not THAT long ago people were super critical about having their kids on the internet at all... To this, which is probably just 80% of the way to maximum lunacy... It's gonna get worse before it gets better. Monetizing kids is so bad.

Would love it if you did an episode around meme accounts that exist to ask stupid/basic questions on facebook just for people to comment obvious answers. For example, I'm looking at one on facebook from "Legitnoble", whoever that is, that posted "No English word has double "OO" except "DOOR" don't copy me PROVE ME WRONG". There are similar twitter accounts too, but where does this stuff come from? This is similar to accounts representing something like old TV shows that are no longer on but there's a group for it and it just posts memes. SOMEONE is doing this, but why?

Much of what you can say about the situation with family blogging, you can basically say about parenting in general. When I got my first job, my mom was like, "All of that money is going into the family pot." Parents decide what you will do or what you won't do. They decide what you consent or don't consent to. Parents make fun of their kids. Parents force their kid into a gymnastics class by the time that kid barely knows to walk. Only in this case of vlogging, it's more public than usual.

Tough topic this episode but I vehemently disagree with the comments about it being inappropriate or not a good fit. It's important to raise awareness about this type of abuse, especially in communities like ours which tend toward onlineness, skew older, and with higher likelihood to be parents who will have to contend with brand of "kid entertainment" down the line if not already.

Not to mention the weeks of criticism Tam and Lucy touched on wherein members of this community lambasted the idea of a show about memes, as if being "very online" is just goofs and gags. It's not, and whether the negative numpties show up to retract their criticism or not, you can't say no one asked for TVOS to tackle serious issues.

Perhaps this episode should be free on YT, because this is a quite intensely disgusting problem that needs to be focused even more on.

Sorry, but this episode was a huge miss for me. I agree its wrong to exploit children, but there's really little difference in this than kid beauty pageants, extremely competitive youth sports leagues, child acting, etc. All this hand wringing like family vlogging the worst thing in the world just has me rolling my eyes. However, what makes this episode feel disingenuous and click-baity is the lack of balance. A few terrible examples are held up without acknowledgement that there is a healthy way to have kids/family vlogs. Also, what research is done into how many of these family vlogs are exploitive? Are we looking at a few outliers or is this representative of most family vlogs?

The whole thing smacks of someone who saw a thing that got her upset and then decided to turn it into a long winded, self righteous rant that will get a lot of people to agree with her, but lacking in real substance. I'm not there for it.

"PS these parents are trash."

This Jan fellow seems alright.

My sister has the same shirt as Jeff B. She has it because I bought it for her since I'm a great person.

This was deeply upsetting

Family Fun Pack! Goodbye Grandma.

Is the answer to go into the woods and never come back?

@slinkdickens:The comparisons you've listed are a total 'whataboutism' and you've totally missed the point. Children can't consent to having their likeness being put onto the internet and while in many cases its harmless to upload, suddenly introducing a child to a feedback loop where they're beholden to an audience is not a normal environment. The crux of this argument is an emotional appeal because most people here can IMMEDIATELY see how this can get so fucked up so quickly. I really think the required amount of empathy to understand the issue isn't very high because some of these videos just trigger strong 'uncanny valley' responses from most of us here.

I mean look at the "You made our kids cry" video. The expressions the eldest child are making are fucking uncanny - she's not even a teen and she's emoting in ways that only experienced 'influencers' do and it makes my skin crawl. This kid is not the product of a normal environment and seeing them act in manufactured ways freaks me the fuck out on a lizard-brain level. You can say the examples here are outliers and this whole thing is a 'slippery slope' fallacy and most families treat their children better but this type of environment didn't exist 20 years ago and raising your child in what's ostensibly an internet panopticon is NOT NORMAL.

If you're looking for studies on the subject there's already SO MANY studies on the subject, especially on what's happening during the pandemic. I've only read the abstracts of a few studies so far but even the inconclusive ones are treating the behaviour like an untested drug that we should hold off using until we have more data. And considering how non-essential 'sharenting' is, I don't see how that's hard to disagree with.

Honestly though - back to the emotional appeal argument - but I really don't understand how it can be so hard to see how doing this isn't SUPER FUCKED UP. Even as adults we struggle to engage with other strangers on the internet, so imagining a child being told they suddenly have 1000 friends they need to think about and perform in front of on a regular basis - it totally is like child acting; even if kids say they want to do it, they're not 'consenting' because we can't assume they have a 100% understanding of the situation. Without experiencing it firsthand, it really takes a mature and developed mind to understand the nature of celebrity and how fucking monstrous it is.

Also these children should be getting fucking paid.

God that episode was scary