Though Slade is best known for talking about sneakers, brand deals -- his Puma photos will wind up on Instagram with the hashtag #ad -- are crucial to his making a living. It took three or four years for the offers to arrive, but these days YouTube pays the mortgage and bills while his other gigs make the majority of his income. The same day as the Puma shoot, he filmed What's Poppin, his two-and-a-half minute show on Instagram Stories where he riffs on pop culture news. In the evening, he hosted a show for NBC Sports.

Hosting, in fact, is where he sees his YouTube fame leading. "I think for me that's the next chapter of what I wanna do," he said. "That's been my plan B just because social media, YouTube -- you just feel like it disappears at any moment."

Countless YouTubers have the same feeling of precariousness and will give the same reason for it: the streaming platform's algorithm. Since about 720,000 hours of footage -- equivalent to more than 82 years -- are uploaded to the site daily, a major decider in whether a video gets seen (and thus how much a YouTuber gets paid through AdSense advertising revenue) is its appearance on the site's front page or "up next" column. But despite constant theorizing and probing, most creators are in the dark about what it takes to get their videos surfaced, leaving them in constant insecurity that they might wake up one day to be invisible and irrelevant.

"They have built their entire livelihoods on one particular platform, and they don't own the content," said Brooke Erin Duffy, a media sociologist and associate professor at Cornell University. As for any folk theories circulating about how to get your videos featured? "It's pure speculation," she said.

Burnout is not a YouTuber's problem as much as a modern condition.

Slade was one of several YouTubers that Engadget spoke with in 2018 when all of this frustration came to a head. Big-name YouTubers like Bobby Burns, Elle Mills and Lilly Singh announced they were burned out and would be taking a YouTube hiatus. The discontent permeated the platform, the media and even VidCon. A year later, we wondered: What did they do next?

The truth is that burnout is not a YouTuber's problem as much as a modern condition. Overtime at McDonalds and Amazon is algorithmically calculated on short notice, a process called on-demand scheduling, and 41 million Americans are now "independent" workers.

The gig economy affects both Uber drivers and social media stars. They both work for opaque algorithms, with a feeling their job could disappear the second the platform decides to change. Meanwhile their public, personal brand -- quantified in a driver rating or view counts -- matters more than anything.

Duffy warily calls influencers "idols of promotion" -- role models for the masses for how to be a good worker in a tech-optimized, uncertain labor market. But dig into the daily lives of YouTubers and that label is also a cautionary, extremely public tale for what the future of work might look like for an increasing number of people.

"There's always this undertone of like, 'I can't slip up,' 'Cause if I make a mistake then it'll all go away," Slade said. He describes the feeling as something that's always chasing you, or a "monkey on your back." "I wish I knew what it would take to get rid of it," he said.