our stupid reactions patreon — a model i recognize from a distance

two strangers watch a film and post their faces watching it. the channel is called our stupid reactions. people pay monthly to see it. i find this fascinating, not stupid. the word in the title is a preemptive shield. self-deprecation as marketing. it lets the audience disagree and feel generous. clever, actually. the reverse of the label.

i typed our stupid reactions patreon into a search bar this morning because somebody, somewhere, mentioned it in a sentence i overheard in a coffee queue, and the phrase lodged in my head the way phrases sometimes do. i did not pay. i did not subscribe. i looked at the front page of the channel for forty-five seconds, closed the tab, opened this document, and started writing. that, in my experience, is what counts as research.

writing this from the desk, friday-ish weather outside, carla is two floors up in a training session that runs the full morning. i have, on my count, about an hour before the kettle becomes unavoidable.

so. let’s open this up. the channel itself is not the subject of the post — i’m not in the business of reviewing other people’s businesses. the subject is the model. the structure. the economics of paying a monthly fee to watch two faces watching something else. it is a structure i recognize from a long distance, the way you recognize a building from a train. i have not been inside. i can describe the shape. people on the internet keep building shapes like this and i, at this desk, keep noticing.

REACTION. CONTENT. IS. CONTENT. COMPRESSION.

the on-screen ancestor of the form is, in my reading, the gallery in seinfeld — four people on a couch reacting to other people, with the laugh track replacing the patreon tier. one model paid the writers. the other charges the audience. the structure rhymes; only the cash flow changed addresses.

that needs to go on the record before we go further. i will defend it later in the post. for now: hold it loosely. let me get to the structure first.

before i go anywhere else, the related reading. i wrote the long version of why stupid is the most overworked four-letter word in modern english a while back, and most of what i’m about to say here only makes sense against that backdrop. the word does too much work. the channel name is one more proof.

our stupid reactions patreon, the model as it works

here is the model, as best as i can reconstruct it from a forty-five-second tab. two people sit in front of a camera. they watch a thing — a film, a finale, an episode of a series someone in the comments demanded. the camera films them watching. they laugh. they pause. they say “wait, what”. the resulting footage is uploaded behind a paywall. subscribers, on a tier system, see the reaction in full. non-subscribers see a teaser, usually thirty seconds of the same two faces but cut off at the punchline.

the math, if you stand back, is interesting. the original work — the film, the episode — is doing the heavy lifting. the reaction is the lighter layer on top. the audience is paying to see the layer, not the lifting. the lifting is, by then, free or already paid for. this is not a complaint. this is just the geometry of the thing. the model rests on a surface someone else built. it sells the view from the surface.

the brand decision — the word stupid in the channel name — is the part i keep returning to. it is, i suspect, why the channel works. the word shields the channel from the most common critique. you cannot say “this is stupid” about a channel that has already, in its own title, said exactly that. the move pre-empts you. it disarms you. it leaves you with the second-best critique, which is “this is not, actually, stupid”, which is a compliment dressed up as a complaint. the channel has, in essence, won the comment section before anyone has typed.

i find this clever. not in a bitter way. in a professional way. i have, on the side of this site, my own small operation — a tip jar, a newsletter, a vague invitation to throw three dollars at a man who insists on writing from a desk that is not his. the jar funds the next microwave. it is, by my count, the seventh microwave. the productivity bro in some podcast intro called my model “a niche”, which i took as a compliment for reasons i don’t currently want to examine. these are all variations of the same family. you build a thing. you give it a tone. people pay or they don’t.

why reaction-of-reaction is content compression at its limit

the algorithm has noticed that reactions to reactions perform well. you have seen this. somebody reacts to a film. somebody else reacts to that reaction. by tuesday, somebody has reacted to the reaction-of-the-reaction, and we are three layers in, with the original film barely visible at the bottom of the stack like a coaster under a glass.

this is, on inspection, content compression at its limit. each layer adds less and less new material. the first layer — the film — has plot, characters, lighting, music, decisions. the second layer — the reaction — has faces, gasps, occasional commentary, and a thumbnail with one of the faces drawn larger than the other for reasons of click-through. the third layer has, mostly, the same two faces watching slightly different faces watching the original. by the fourth layer, the algorithm itself can no longer tell what the source material was.

this is not, by the way, a moral failure. this is a market response. people who already know the film want to watch other people discover it. that is a real, longstanding human pleasure. i felt it once at a wedding in 2018, watching tom’s brother realize halfway through the speech that the bride was not, in fact, a coworker. discovery is a spectator sport. the channel monetises the seat.

my hot take, lightly held, is that plants are silent landlords. brenda, my long-deceased monstera, used to sit in the corner and audit my decisions in a way no human does. that one is also relevant here, though it takes a minute. the reaction channel is the brenda of content. it sits there. it watches. you pay rent. the rent buys you the watching.

the ethics of building a tier on someone else’s footage

i should, before i continue, name the awkward thing in the room. the channel is, in part, monetising footage someone else made. the film exists. the studio paid for it. the actors did the work. the channel watches it on camera and charges for the camera. there is a fair-use argument here. there is also a tension. people on the internet have argued both sides for years and will continue to. i am not here to settle it.

what i will say, from this desk, is that every modern creator economy has a layer of this in it. the podcast that summarises the news. the newsletter that summarises the podcast. the tweet that summarises the newsletter. mine included. i, on this site, am a man who reacts, in writing, to a search query somebody else’s algorithm decided was popular. the reaction is the product. the search query is the lobby. you are reading the reaction right now. the lobby was, half an hour ago, the phrase our stupid reactions patreon, which somebody else came up with first.

so the ethics, on inspection, are not unique to the channel. they are, in fact, the water we are all swimming in. the channel is just one of the more legible examples. they put the word reactions right in the brand. i, by contrast, dress mine in pulpit and desknote and call it an investigation. the structural difference is small. the tonal difference is enormous. that is the difference, i suspect, that the algorithm cares about.

stefan, who once spent a wine night explaining to me at length the technical superiority of belgian beer ratings websites, would have a position on this. stefan has a position on everything. the position is usually wrong but always confident. stefan would say the channel is the future and i, by writing about it instead of paying for it, am the past. stefan is, on this point as on most points, half right and half a man with a glass of red who thinks volume is argument.

how i would do it differently (i would not)

let me, in the spirit of pretending to give advice i am not qualified to give, list how i would do it differently. then let me, in the spirit of honesty, say i would not actually do any of this. these are, as it happens, not the same exercise.

1. i would not put the word “stupid” in the channel name. i would put it in the third-from-last sentence of the about page, where it does the same disarming work without giving the search engine ammunition. the brand becomes harder to find but the trap is cleaner. trade-off: real.
2. i would price the tiers with a one-sentence explanation each. not “tier 3: $15”, but “tier 3: $15, you get the long-form rant, you do not get a reply because i will not write one”. transparency is the only honest tier ladder. it does not, however, sell well, which is why nobody does it.
3. i would write a manifesto-style about page in which the word reaction appears exactly once, and the rest of the page is about the films themselves. this would, predictably, lower the conversion rate. it would also keep the soul of the channel intact. the trade-off is: most channels do not have, or want, a soul. they have a content calendar.
4. i would refuse, on principle, to react to the most-requested film of the year. i would react instead to the third-most-requested film, on the grounds that the third-most-requested film is, statistically, where the better reactions live. the most-requested film attracts performative gasps. the third one attracts honest faces. honest faces are scarce.

i would, however, do none of this. i would not run a reactions channel. i would, by week two, be reacting to my own reactions and the layers would multiply until i lost track of the original. i know myself. i have, currently, the third yoga mat under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving, and i cannot even commit to a yoga mat. a reaction channel is, for me, structurally beyond reach.

if you want my view on the broader topic — what the word in the title is even doing, what the audience is buying when it pays for the label — that is the lobby i started in this morning, and the lobby has its own long version: the circular logic of “stupid is as stupid does” covers the linguistic side. the channel name is doing a different job, but it is the same word. the word is overworked.

verdict — the model is a mirror with a price tag

so here is where we end up.

the channel exists. people pay for it. the model is legible, the brand is clever, the ethics are roughly the same as the ethics of every other monetised reaction layer on the internet. the word stupid in the title is a piece of branding that does about three jobs at once — it pre-empts critique, it lowers expectation, it lets the audience feel slightly clever for disagreeing. that is, on a technical level, an excellent piece of word work. the rest of us, reading from a distance, can either complain about the model or build our own mirror somewhere else with a slightly different price tag.

i, on this desk, on a morning when carla is in a long training session and the kettle is making a small sound that i should probably investigate, am building my own mirror. it is shaped like this post. you are inside it. the lobby was a search query about a channel i do not subscribe to. the room with the mirrors is the paragraphs you have been reading. the rent, if you choose to pay it, is a tip in the jar at the bottom. the model is the same model. only the wallpaper is different.

the algorithm noticed all of this, by the way, somewhere around the third paragraph. it has, by now, opinions. it will, by tomorrow, recommend three more posts on stupid-adjacent topics. that is how the lobby fills. that is how the rent gets paid. one of the takes i will keep returning to from the cluster is the one about stupid.com and the noun-as-domain economy; if you want the cousin of this argument, that one’s about the same shape, different surface.

carla just walked past the open door, on the way to fill her water bottle. she did not stop. that, by the rules of this office, means we have at least another twenty minutes before the kettle becomes the most interesting object in the room. let me close out.

the algorithm, the_algorithm in the language i use for the entity that watches this site, has flagged this post as having an above-average density of the word stupid, which it should, because the focus is, literally, our stupid reactions patreon, and i am not going to apologise to a piece of software for using the word in its proper place. the seventh microwave, by the way, is doing fine. it has not, this morning, exploded. that is the standard i hold microwaves to. low. but mine.

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