I have always been an introvert. I tend to enjoy solo hobbies like reading, drawing, and video games. But even introverts can become lonely. And I don’t think I realized until recently how incredibly lonely I am as a person. It’s certainly a difficult time to be alive, but I know for a fact that, despite my introverted nature, I didn’t used to feel so tremendously lonely. So what happened?

In 2008, I happened upon a video review of a game called Bayou Billy by a man growing a modest following online. His name was Noah, he called himself “The Spoony One”. In retrospect, many the videos that followed were somewhat gauche. There was lots of toilet humor and problematic jokes at the expense of others. But for reasons I don’t fully understand, I really liked it. I really liked him, to be honest. His videos led me to a larger website, then called ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com (it would later be changed to Channel Awesome), where a ring of content producers made videos from home and posted them to the site. There was a small, but dedicated fan base of people surrounding it and I soon fell into their ranks.

Everyone had their favorites. I was personally quite partial to Lindsay Ellis a.k.a “the Nostalgia Chick” a distaff character to the sites titular leader “The Nostalgia Critic” and many of the more “liberal” producers who chose to make more analytical content rather than scream into the camera about plotholes in straight-to-video flicks made in the 1980s. And I still firmly believe that the website may have continued to thrive until this day had it’s fate been in their hands and not others. But that’s another story.

Loneliness.

I found a community there online that I had never had before. That community was flawed, certainly, but it gave me a social outlet that I desperately needed. For the first time in my life I belonged somewhere. ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com was stupid and- yes- kind of lame, but it was mine. It was like the playground at recess that we all congregated around after school. Our own digital clubhouse.

But it couldn’t last. A combination of swift changing technology and what appears to be complete incompetency on the part of TGWTG’s owners led the site and it’s community into total chaos. Drama swelled in the forums, their were social media fights, “the Spoony One” in particular had several career-ending Twitter tirades, and eventually the top-tier talent migrated away to other platforms.

This felt like the end of an era and in a way it sort of was. As YouTube and the no defunct Blip.tv became more mainstream, producers found it wasn’t necessary to even have their own websites. So sites dedicated to one or a handful of producers fell away in lieu of social media like Twitter and Tumblr. The result was that watching these videos became for the first time since it’s inception a completely solitary endeavour.

So now in 2018, a solid decade after Bayou Billy, I find myself back where I started. I still follow many of the producers from the old days. I’ve watched them grow up, improve their work, and some have evolve into truly impressive creators. But the sense of camaraderie is lost to time. Adrift in a sea of content, I am alone again.