Much like James Gunn's tweets from years ago being brought back by alt-right trolls, Coffee Break had to go pretty far back in the Kurzgesagt archives to find a problematic video. Specifically, the video on addiction was published back in 2015, almost 4 years ago. This fact alone doesn't do Coffee Break any favors in his effort to look like some sort of vox populi. To paraphrase Cenk Uygur, if you need to dig that far back into someone's past and that's the worst you can find, any way but straight back up is digging yourself a deeper hole.
Coffee Break is a modestly-sized YouTube channel; its 315K subscriber account is nothing to sneeze at, but it's dwarfed by Kurzgesagt's 8 million and counting. It's easy to play the jealousy card, but it's just as easy to play the David vs. Goliath one as well, and given how Coffee Break paints himself in this story, I'd say this makes us even. The saving grace of the former is that no one suffers the double whammy of a concussion and a sword in the back should the confrontation go south.
It's absolutely adorable that Coffee Break thinks Kurzgesagt can pump out a fully-scripted and animated video in the course of roughly a month, as if the team was able to drop everything and start work on getting ahead of this controversy. The reason the deck often seems so stacked against animation on YouTube is that whenever it isn't an expensive venture, it's exceedingly time-consuming. Animation software has done wonders for lone wolves, but it's several decades and some serious AI developments away from being set-and-forget.
Coffee Break still insists the video is a rush job spurred by his digging, and maybe it is, but the quagmire of conspiratorial accusations he attaches to this claim paints a picture of a salty, embittered nonentity's 15 minutes in the spotlight not being on his own terms. At present, the dis/like ratio on his would-be expose is almost 50/50, though slightly more folks in his favor than the factual flock. Maybe that half-and-half would have persisted regardless of Kurzgesagt's transparency, possibly with a dip in the total number of directional thumbs. Maybe Coffee Break's audience would have ruled the roost while the rest of the site continued to trust Kurzgesagt.
All I want to know is how his coffee smells without his nose. (18/4/19 UPDATE: He gets it)
This story doesn't simply stick out to me because I'm a fan of the factual flock, but also because Coffee Break's situation hits me a little close to home, and I've been given a glimpse into the other side of a coin toss and all that would have emerged from it. This site has fancied itself on reviews, typically of movies, but also of the occasional bit of kit, and even some software here and there. The pattern is typically that an item is released into the public, the public reacts, voices their opinions, and then that's kind of the end of the story. It's a pattern I've been thinking about a lot lately, and over the past year or so I've come to the revelation that this pattern is not only antiquated for reasons I'll get into, but also needlessly divisive and utterly unhelpful to most involved.
In this age of social media, production and consumption have gone from being acquaintances to practically full-blown marriage. Feedback is immediate, lines of communication are rarely closed, and the initial purchase of said media-to-be-consumed is not the end of the transaction. Those in the PC gaming master race know full well I'm going to bring up patches, a concept that's only gotten more efficient as internet connections get faster and can handle larger files. Release dates suddenly become sliding scales of quality assurance, and for the most part a lot of people don't really mind. There may be some initial grumblings among the eager few when their brand-new lost-weekend-in-a-box can't even get past its opening title screen before taking a sharp right off the road and into the leafy cudgels of a whomping willow, but few problems are so first world as having to wait a few weeks for a video game to become properly playable. The disappointment rarely lingers, and typically it may only do so as some kind of statement about a larger trend.
I once stood poised to give a company endless grief over a discount code they gave me not working. The week before I was ready to post the review, the app went free. Suddenly, I didn't have a leg to stand on. Was I mad? No, maybe a little frustrated for all of about 30 seconds because those outlining paragraphs I'd spent time filling out being rendered wholly inaccurate. At the end of the day, I got what I truly wanted. I wanted the damn app to work. It's one matter to expose obvious fraud and deception, it's quite another to strongarm someone into a situation where their only recourse towards making the situation right is to lie.
