The Youtube Community

Youtube needs very little explanation as to what it is and what it's used for. Youtube is also, however, a different experience from most of the other online communities I've been in. It's almost like what one puts into it is how much one receives out of it. Because everything is video based, depending on the types of videos one makes, that person can join a very large variety of groups and friends. If I were to recommend friends on Youtube, get to know people that can be talked to outside of the site. I show how I did this via Skype, but there are other clients that can be used.

There are a few favorite Youtube users of mine that I followed with no account of my own to claim. GarlandtheGreat, ProtonJon, and TheMeInTeam were some of my favorites to watch. However, checking every account I liked without subscribing to them proved to become tiring. I then decided to create my own Youtube account called TheDragoon1140, and I had an incredible amount of fun editing everything on my account.

Here is my first Youtube account along with my first video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDragoon1140#p/u/45/_ndaeI9mWo4

I've always liked a certain type of video called a Let's Play. Essentially, the user plays the video game whilst commentating. There are quite a few websites dedicated to the subject and some people make a living off of judging how well people create Let's Plays. I had a microphone, I had Hypercam, and I could play video games on my laptop. Thus, I started to make videos that are, arguably, the horrible incarnation of the swamp people; they were bad. After creating a few videos of a game called Syobon Action, a user named DDRManiac007 posted some comments relating to the video.

Though I didn't know it at the time, DDRManiac007 (now DDR) found my videos while he was searching information about it since he was going to Let's Play it soon. After chatting for a while, he helped my setup my Skype account. We then started communicating by webcam and it neat talking to a Canadian who was actually quite stereotypical, much to my amusement. He was even nice enough to create a collage of all of my videos on my birthday. At that point, I decided I really needed to collaborate with other Youtube users to have any hope of actually being noticed. I then started Let's Playing a game called World of Goo, which is easily one of my favorite games ever. After about twenty or so videos, I finished it and gained about five subscribers, which was amazing to me then.

After that is where the problems started. Fans of mine will notice that "TheDragoon1140" is not the account I use now on Youtube, which is now just "Dragoon1140." What happened was that I chose the option of always staying logged on, which means I never had to type in my password when I wanted to use my account. Much to my endless frustration, Youtube logged me off one day and I couldn't remember my password. To this day, I still have no idea what I typed for my password. I created my account Dragoon1140 a proceeded to recover what I had lost.

My Youtube account that was much, much better than the last one:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Dragoon1140

After another Let's Play, I quickly realized that I didn't just like Let's Plays, I liked challenges. I've always been a fan of GarlandtheGreat for completing very hard Final Fantasy 7 challenges, and I was curious if I could do the same. Final Fantasy 7 is one of my favorite games, so I figured I should try out an easy challenge to see how I well I would do. I finished the challenge quite easily, but I met a few more people in the process, including EmpressAeris.

During the Final Fantasy 7 challenge, more and more people started to be included in the Skype group. Zettovyker was the third person in the group and he is definitely going to go far in the Youtube world if he continues. However, things started to change quickly. A few weeks later, the small group of DDR, Zettovyker, and myself were joined by almost twenty more people. I'm not sure why DDR added so many to the group, it's something I'll have to ask him one day. I didn't like it all that much since I didn't really know anybody but a few, and half of the people in the group were less than fifteen, which is less than appealing. I decided to uninstall Skype after the group started growing ridiculously large.

After I left the group, I was looking for another community to join. I then found Elements, and I've already explained that story in the previous blog post. I was growing rather tired of Let's Plays and I wanted to begin helping the Elements community, so I chose to begin creating solely Elements videos. As I've explained before, the videos were rather bad, but I was the very first to do anything like it. After a few months, I ended up at about one hundred subscribers, and it was an amazing feeling to reach such a number.

Moving on to the next phase in my life, I ended up not posting videos for a long while. Perhaps I'll make more in the future, maybe even on a new account, but not for a while. I met and lost quite a few friends on Youtube, so I would recommend the experience to anyone, but friends have their own goals as well. The one thing I learned on Youtube is to keep friends close and accept any changes they make to their personality.