Not ready to head to bed yet, I duck into my office, and go down the YouTube rabbit hole. After watching a bunch of videos, one comes across my feed and I smile. It’s a long video so let me summarize it:
A random YT guy decided to take some all too familiar pot-shots at WatchMojo. It’s been done before and will likely be done again, but this one caught my eye.
Having worked as a script writer for WM for around 4 years, I was very interested to see what this particular YouTuber had to say about them. I watched the video, and despite his multiple tangents, it was interesting to see how his take on WM knowing my own reasons why I stopped writing for them.
But what got me the most, was the pinned reply in the comments section.
When I read this, I was honestly quite surprised. It read like an 8yr old being mad at someone because they got called a bad name.
I then opted to write my own comment on the video given my own history with WM. Here’s what I wrote:
I was a huge fan of WM. So much that I applied to be a freelance writer for them, and got the job. I wrote 200+ scripts for them over the course of four years. And for me, I thoroughly enjoyed it because by far and large, I got to write about stuff that I liked, I knew about, and was passionate about. And for the most part, I was pretty good at it. I was always treated well, given lots of latitude, and genuinely enjoyed the people at WM I interacted with. Speaking only from my own experience at that point, WM was quite a joy to be a part of, and I still look back on much of it with fond memories.
However… I am not a freelancer there any more.
I went back and forth between true freelance, and essentially part of the week-to-week crew of script writers. When I finally flipped back to true freelance the last time, that was part for personal reasons, and part of what this video talks about.
Week after week would go by, I would see similar topics surface again and again. Top 10s turn into Top 20s, and Top 30s. A previously covered topic would surface again but with just a slightly different spin on it, enough for the powers that be to “justify” a whole new video. There was less in the way of material I found interesting, and more emphasis on the churn of repeated content. Sure, there was a pool of hundreds of topics for freelancers to pull from, but as time wore on, that list became inundated with familiar material.
Now, admittedly, I’m considerably older than many of the other writers, so I will absolutely take the hit on the fact that there was a ton of topics in the pool I either had no interest in because of my age, or simply because I didn’t even know what the topic was. I’m not a gamer for example, so the entire pool of gaming topics wasn’t something I went near. But for the topics I was heavily invested in, all too often I was seeing “more of the same” which for a writer, and to many viewers, is redundant and mundane.
I haven’t been a part of that crew for a few years so I don’t know what it’s like now. I was a loyal subscriber for a long time, but after I stopped writing, I stopped watching because I wasn’t finding the lists interesting anymore.
Since I left, I have seen other videos and posts similar to this one and I find them a bit of a mixed bag. I have a lot of fond memories of the work I did, and the people I worked with. But I tend to agree that it feels like they are past their heyday which is unfortunate. The “top 10” format can be fun, but it feels to me like they’ve taken that format way farther than it was ever intended, and not in a good way.
Lastly, reading the pinned reply from them just made me shake my head. This reply was clearly written by someone who needs better grammar and spelling lessons, and should probably take advice from their own editorial team. This felt like more of a knee-jerk reaction from an irritated employee than that of a “professional company” responding to criticism.
The comment from WM itself actually bothered me more than anything else. The people I worked with were awesome. And sure, as time went by, I did become frustrated by the content churn, but I also got annoyed by the over-sensitivity to political correctness, the excessive research and non-writing I had to do. I’m also not exactly their target demographic either so it’s easy for me to complain about not finding interesting things to write about in their 1000+ list of topics.
But seeing them respond like this to a random criticism seemed really childish to me. And then I went down the chain of comments and found one that mentioned how their CEO has endorsed the use of AI to replace some of their writers. Which admittedly, other companies are doing as well, but it just soured me even further.
That’s all. Just random useless commentary at 2:17AM when I should be in bed.
At least I finally posted something on here after a year and a half of nothing 🙂
