Some Thoughts on “Reaction” “Content”

Today I wanted to talk about react content and content theft. It’s a big topic but I wanted to share at least a few thoughts on the matter for quite a while now but never got around to publishing anything on it. I’m sure there are some aspects I won’t be able to cover today but I’ll try my best to at least cover the very basics of the subject matter and give my insights to it.

On that note, I know it should be “reaction content” and not “react content” but given the lack of “reaction” and the lack of “content” in these videos, I don’t think either term really applies all that well anyway so whatever. Just be aware, that I’ll say the latter a lot here.

On another note, though, I’ll spend a good portion of this post talking about all reaction content but especially the later parts, where I criticize it a lot, is meant to be only about the bad cases… aka the majority of reaction content where people literally just reupload content they don’t own to make fat money from it in the laziest way possible.

What is React Content?

React content at its core can be classified as content that shows the reactions, criticisms and commentary of people viewing media. “Media” in this case can be anything from articles, videos, streams, movies, trailers, music videos, episodes of a television show, news or literally anything. There are numerous examples of content that literally just shows people watching other content, but I think the baseline is that it’s content showing reactions.

I don’t know exactly where react content originated from, as in who “invented” it, but I’d imagine that it got popularized by variety shows on television where the hosts watch a clip of something that happened, be it news, social media posts or something sent in by viewers, and then talk about it. I know that it’s a staple in Japanese television, and that it has been that for ages over there now.

America obviously eventually also did it with popular show hosts (think Kimmel, Fallon, etc.) adapting the formula and “reacting” to clips sent in by viewers or some entertaining snippets that went viral on social media.

The concept of “reacting to something” isn’t that original in the first place. Arguably, newspapers are just reacting to happenings, right?

On YouTube, the idea to literally just watch a video and film your thoughts is also not that original. I guess the “Fine Brothers” (the folks who wanted to trademark the word “react”) did, however, help in popularizing the idea with their “Kids/Teens/Elders react” series where people of different age groups were shown new or old things respectively… which then prompted bigger YouTubers to “react” to that… and then they would react to the YouTubers reacting to them… It’s an ecosystem, I guess.

Transformative Content

For the sake of this post, I’ll limit the very broad definition up there to people reacting to videos of any kind, so, for instance, a streamer reacting to a YouTube video and then uploading their reaction to YouTube themselves.

In the case of Fine Brothers Entertainment’s “X reacts to” series, the content that was reacted to was shown to the group of people reacting to it in full but the video that ended up on YouTube only showed snippets of it. Otherwise, you’d end up seeing a bunch of kids react to 12 minutes worth of videos many different times which would be boring to watch as an FBE viewer, right? So, it was edited down.

Rather than showing the video in full, the focus was on the person’s reaction, so they only showed a few of those – the ones that were most entertaining, interesting, common, uncommon, etc. – and then put it all into a video. For most of their videos, that is only half the video, though, as they would then proceed to ask a bunch of questions to the people that just “reacted” to these videos, meaning they could create discussion and get more input of those people that reacted to the content.

If they hadn’t done that, the video probably would have either been too boring to watch or it would have been taken down for being literal content theft and copyright infringement. To not have the video taken down, in full or in part, the “reaction video” needs to be transformative – which requires a certain amount of value being added to the original content.

Now, the problem with it is that most “react content” nowadays isn’t transformative. It’s literally just people playing clips, short form content, or whole videos, shows and movies, in full, on their channels with barely any reaction to it.

A laugh doesn’t make something transformative btw.

For react content to be transformative while showing the full clip/video/etc., you’d have to end up with a considerably longer video than the original work full of your remarks, commentary, criticisms, etc. but very obviously that’s not something that people do. People just steal the original content.

Content Theft

There are countless examples of people like xQc “reacting” to a video on stream, only to leave the room a few minutes and appear very much later. Most of that guy’s content is just him chuckling here and there to videos he doesn’t own or have permission to use. There are examples of xQc’s “reactions” from his stream being uploaded to YouTube and being exactly the same length as the original work. There’s two-hour videos that are being reuploaded to YouTube essentially.

Similarly, there are plenty of other streamers and YouTubers who will just watch viral TikTok content and then provide literally nothing of value to it. At times, they’ll describe what literally just happened which isn’t transformative. Other times they’ll just laugh or have a deadpan expression on their face. There are even instances where their “reaction” is missing completely or where a video is just shown, sometimes multiple times, in full for no reason (aside from padding out the watch time to get more ads on the video).

And this “content” is incredibly successful with children in particular. They don’t care about content theft, crediting the original creator or who the original creator is. They just want to “watch the funny TikTok clips”, so they click on those creators’ videos because it’s where they all are uploaded. Ethics don’t matter in the brain of a child. Ethics also don’t matter in the brains of these creators. They’re making fat cash after all.

Crediting the Creators

Now, obviously, it would help if they asked for permission but most of them have daily content deadlines to meet, so that won’t work. At least it’d be somewhat okay to then react to something as long as you got the permission to do so.

Crediting creators where credit is due is incredibly important and the literal bare minimum. It doesn’t excuse literal content theft but it at least gives people a chance to watch the original video.

The problem here is, however, that the original creator can’t often be found too well given that some videos on TikTok and YouTube in particular are freebooted. The original creator’s handle gets cropped out of the video and then re-uploaded to a different channel.

Instagram has a problem with this in particular where there’s just a huge amount of content theft going on with people stealing “memes” and then reposting them for the sake of growing their accounts… but the same applies to YouTube and TikTok, too, where it doesn’t matter if you’re original or whatever… All that matters are the amounts of views you get.

With a lot of the videos that people like xQc, SSSniperwolf, Jason Derulo (yes, that guy) and other people “react” to (as in “steal”), that’s the case. They literally are freebooting videos that are freebooted already. They’re stealing videos that were already stolen in the first place.

The Damage Done

Let’s talk about the damage done to the content creation sphere and to the original creators.

When a big streamer or YouTuber or whatever reacts to a video in full and then reuploads that “reaction” to their own channel, it doesn’t support the original creator at all, even if you add credit to the original video in the description and even if you’re as transformative as possible.

The reason for that is that because you reacted to a video in full, the original creator’s video doesn’t need to be watched. Hbomberguy’s 3:51:49 long video “Plagiarism and You(Tube)” (btw, incredibly well-made, just like all of his videos, huge recommendation) is literally just short of four hours.

If someone were to watch the full four hours as part of a “reaction video” that literally shows the video in full + some “reaction” of any kind,… How likely do you think is it that people who watched the “reaction” video will also watch the original video, especially considering its length and the fact that they just watched that length plus a little bit on another channel?

Exactly! Very not likely. You’re so smart.

Here is a Twitter post by “NeoExplains” about xQc “reacting” to their video. xQc literally leaves the room while the video is playing on his stream – and then he mocks that he isn’t reacting to it.

Following up on that tweet, Neo Explains (see what I did there?) how there is no bump in viewership of any kind among the video’s analytics despite the big streamer “reacting” to that video. Huh. How odd.

I don’t have a bone to pick with xQc really by the way. I don’t like the guy but this isn’t about him. It’s not my fault that he’s just the epitome of what’s wrong with “reaction” “content”.

One person in the replies states that “so many people want to control every aspect of online content. Don’t want it viewed in ways you don’t like? Don’t make the content public and free. Simple as that” which is kind of troubling. I don’t know if that person likes theft but if I were to steal their car, I wonder how they’d feel about me saying “Don’t like others taking your shit? Don’t own it in public. Simple as that”. I’m sure they’d like that.

The original video gets stolen and when people call it out, people like that show up. “Don’t like it, deal with it”, “Run it off” or “literally just don’t make content if you don’t want it to be stolen”. Again, just replace “original video” with something these guys own and then the argument isn’t sound anymore.

So, when a person calls out behaviour like this (that is also against most platforms’ community guidelines), they end up getting bombarded by hateful, and frankly stupid, people who excuse this behaviour. Their original content that they spent (at times) months working on suddenly is being stolen right underneath their fingers… and when they DMCA it, they get more hate for it because they are risking the thief’s channel being terminated by doing so.

It’s so warped.

But also, there are plenty of content creators who will tell their audience to go to the video and leave a like… but this can also result in more harm for the original creators because they’ll suddenly have worse stats and the YouTube algorithm might even rank them lower as a result.

Think about it this way: If a lot of people click on a video only to leave a like and then leave, it means that the video wasn’t interesting enough for them since they didn’t stick around for the video, right? At least, YouTube will think so, and then rank the video lower.

The average watch time for that video is diluted because of lots of people not watching the video or just watching it for a few seconds. The view count might see a small spike but it’s not significant in most cases. A lot of the views might not even count since they’re not watching the video in the first place. There are videos with thousands of likes but hundreds of views, after all, which also seems suspicious. As a result, real viewers might think you’re like-botting.

Hence, even credit where it is due can possibly harm the original creator.

What can we do?

Complaining about, describing, contextualising and explaining these matters is cool and all but it doesn’t really do much unless I also give solutions as to what can be done about this sort of behaviour.

One thing that one might do is call it out. Look at me doing it. But also confrontation is scary so I’d understand it if people didn’t want to do that. Calling it out is scary, especially when there’s huge creators involved, which is why I’m gonna start somewhere else.

#1 – Do better.

There is a YouTuber called Jacksfilms who makes parody and comedic videos as well as songs that are pretty cool… and a while ago, back in 2016, he called out this “creator” called Jinx who would literally just stare blankly at videos and then upload them to YouTube… so, Jacksfilms would upload videos of him reacting to that “content” and essentially bringing it ad absurdum.

Jinx eventually got bullied off the platform.

A while ago, he created a channel called JJJacksfilms as a parody of Sniperwolf where he’d end up “reacting” to her content and grading it based on how transformative it is. I wasn’t a fan of that. It felt like it was just short of cyberbullying in a way but also it was supposed to show how little YouTube cares about this stuff. Anyway, since then, the content got more different with Jacksfilms “meme-ing” on it much more and also criticizing all sorts of creators – Oh, and, now a year later, here’s one video of him talking about Sniperwolf again and seeing how stuff hasn’t changed at all.

The reason why I bring up Jacksfilms is that the criticism he brings in his “bingo” series are pretty valid and I do think that the very best thing that people can do is just do better. So, asking for permission, editing don’t the video, pre-watching and then only showing snippets that are important (in the case of streams), being transformative in the commentary, not showing the video in full, and more… All of those are very good points that people who do “reaction” “content” should take to heart.

#2 – DMCA that shit

If you are a creator whose content is being stolen in this way, most platforms do have tools to report copyright infringement and DMCA the infringing content.

In some cases, like on YouTube, the platform even helps you out by informing you of infringing content which you can then mass-flag if you want to. In some cases, this is getting abused, which sucks, but people stealing something you own is literally what these tools are for.

So, if you create content and someone literally just steals it and reuploads it as their own or acts as if they’re “reacting to it”, then just DMCA that shit.

In Blogging, scrapers are a thing. Scrapers are the react content of blogging, so to speak. I’d imagine that if a streamer were to read out my blog post and then give their thoughts on said blog post, that’d be totally fine, in a way, for me at least, as long as they properly credit that blog post in question… but scrapers don’t do that.

They just copy-paste my blog post, run it through machine translation to one language only to then run it back into English, and then they reupload it… often accidentally linking to one of my posts, like this one. (Yes, I just linked a post on content theft and DMCA in this post, and when this post gets stolen, I’ll get notified of the backlink. Fun.)

In the case of short-form content, you can also still copyright claim that stuff. In fact, the Jacksfilms video I linked up there, did also include him talking extensively about a video that was cut out of the “react content”, probably because of DMCA, which then resulted in the video being just short of eight minutes, meaning that they don’t get the optimal amount of ads.

#3 – Boycott it. Don’t reward it.

Last but not least, if you see people “reacting” to content and you don’t like it… don’t watch it.

I’ve recently seen a streamer that I follow (who is incredibly cool usually and just a very kind soul in an otherwise cold world – Bless their heart!) do react content. I unfollowed them. Just unapologetically stealing content like that is not just lazy but also incredibly rude.

They were doing a 24-hour stream of sorts for Halloween or whatever and while they were sleeping (don’t question it, people do that on stream, I guess) in the “I am only Sleeping” category, they let videos play out of Shane and Ryan from Watcher investigating supernatural hotspots. There is obviously no “reaction” here. That streamer literally let multiple videos of Ryan and Shane play automatically on stream while they were sleeping. This is fucking lazy and just unethical. And this is a small streamer.

Tons of streamers do this, btw, and since the biggest streamers seem to create a meta of sorts whenever they’re successful with something incredibly lazy, hundreds of people copy them and literally do the same. So, the best way to combat this sort of behaviour is to literally boycott it.

Don’t like it? Don’t watch it.

I unfollowed this person because they were literally stealing content in their sleep. They then later proceeded to watch short-form videos and all they’d provide to the video at hand is a laugh or something. They’d sometimes play the videos multiple times and not provide anything of value to it. It’s just theft. Heck, if they at least linked to the channels and videos, it’d be at least a little better.

The best thing we can do is to not watch it. In some cases, report it. Just don’t reward this type of behaviour.

Alas

I doubt it will stop unless platforms like YouTube and Twitch literally purge creators of any size that engage in this type of content theft. At least suspend them for a few weeks based on the grade of their theft.

If they did that, it would send a signal that they don’t like what’s happening here… but as it stands, YouTube has yet to do anything about it. The team literally doesn’t seem to care at all about this sort of theft. In fact, it gets incentivised with “react” content being pushed in the algorithm to people of all kinds, especially kids, and with these videos making way too much money considering the little amount of work they took to make.

React content is a blight.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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