Sub for Sub

Another contentious practice that lies at the intersection of sociality and the commodification of effort is known on YouTube as “sub for sub,” which means “subscription for subscription.” People may offer to subscribe to one’s YouTube channel with the understanding that the receiver will subscribe back. An account is required to upload videos, post comments, or subscribe to other people’s channels. Subscriptions work differently on YouTube than they do in other areas of media and information. At the time of the fieldwork, subscriptions were free. To subscribe was a trivial operation. One need only click on a yellow “subscribe” button on a YouTuber's channel page, and then one could be alerted when that video maker posted a new video. Alerts could appear on an individually personalized version of the YouTube welcome page when a user logs on, or they could be sent through email. In other words, when I logged on to YouTube, the welcome page showed me the new videos that the channels to whom I subscribed had recently uploaded. I also received a subscription update in an email.

Notably, whereas any casual user can go to YouTube and view a video, to subscribe to YouTube requires an account. In interviews, YouTube participants often said that they subscribed to people only when they wished to follow particular creators, rather than subscribing to anyone they viewed. YouTube also had a “friending” feature similar to that offered on social network sites such as MySpace, but few of the YouTube participants in this ethnographic study took this feature seriously (Lange, "Publicly"). For example, on some participants’ channel pages, they warn people not to ask them to be “friended” because they feel the feature is “redundant” and may simply invite spam. In my ethnographic observation, people often made social connections directly through the viewing and commenting on videos, rather than through structural “friending” features (Lange, "Publicly").

People had very different attitudes with regard to having subscribers and to subscribing to other participants. One teenaged girl I spoke to said she liked having subscribers because it helped her “meet people.” She felt a sense of satisfaction when she discovered someone who was talented and she became a loyal subscriber before that video maker became famous. Another mother of several small children noted that she tended to subscribe to someone when she felt she liked even one of their videos. Subscribing became a way to bookmark a video that she feared she might not find again. Some people do not like to have too many subscriptions, as they do not like to have an ever-expanding list of YouTube participants appear on their welcome page. Many interviewees do not like to keep active subscriptions of people whom they do not regularly watch. Most people whom I spoke to, whether they participate on YouTube for professional reasons or for fun, privileged the merits of videos over the relationship between themselves and the video maker when deciding when to subscribe to someone else. Even though subscribing to others is free and the effort required to subscribe is negligible, people say they choose quality and enjoyment of videos in making a decision to subscribe, rather than because the videos are made by a friend.

A parody video called “People Who Beg Shamelessly For Attention on YouTube...” bemoans the trend for some video makers to badger others into participation through things like subscriptions. This parodic video, posted by OhCurt on February 8, 2009, protests the way people pester others to engage with videos through actions such as commenting and subscribing, whether or not the video artistically merits such participation. As of June 18, 2010 the video had 4,911 views, and 242 comments. The video contains clips of many YouTubers pretending to ask viewers to “rate, comment, and subscribe” to videos. Over a black background with white writing, the video eventually asks when all of this badgering will simply become “white noise” that overtakes the substance of videos.

Several comments posted to this humorous video reveal oft-expressed sentiments of frustration that people in the study felt when they were asked to subscribe to someone else’s YouTube channel. As one commenter to this video stated, “There is a better way than asking ‘rate, comment, subscribe’ - it's called ‘making quality videos.’” Another noted, “I comment or rate when I feel like it (which is often). I subscribe only after I've seen several videos by this person and I know that I want to continually see more.” Discourses of quality tend to frame the reasoning behind subscribing to another YouTube participant. On YouTube, participants have the option to display or hide the list of people to whom they have subscribed. Displaying such a list becomes an index of their personal and cultural taste that others may observe and judge (Bourdieu). In this sense, subscriptions were often not taken lightly by interviewees or by people who posted videos and comments discussing this subject.

Subscriptions are another way in which YouTube can take metrics of popularity and choose some videos over others for additional visibility. At the top of the YouTube home page are tabs including “Home,” “Videos,” “Channels,” and “Shows.” Clicking on the “Channels” tab, one can then choose to click on the “Most Subscribed” list for a particular time interval, such as “this week,” “this month,” and “all time.” Similar to the dynamics of comment metrics, participants who need visibility may seek out others and try to persuade them to subscribe to their channel. Their goal is to move closer to appearing on such a list. Practically speaking, hundreds of thousands of subscribers would be needed to break into the list. As of January 2010, the list included only the comparatively highest 120 channels on YouTube; the last channel on the list had more than 100,000 subscribers.

In the “sub for sub” practice, a person offers to subscribe if the recipient will reciprocally subscribe back. People who subscribe to you on YouTube are called your “subscribers.” People to whom you subscribe are called your “subscriptions.” On the surface, “sub for sub” may seem an odd practice. In terms of overall incremental tallies, it increases each video maker’s subscribers equally, and does not give one participant a competitive advantage vis-à-vis the other member of the dyad. Each participant gains a new subscriber (the other person has subscribed to them) and their subscription tally increases (they have now subscribed to someone else). However, sub for sub participants may have an advantage over video makers who may never gain these particular additional subscribers.

The sub for sub practice was a highly contentious practice and thus is a “contested concept” in which different people held varying views on its legitimacy and usefulness (Radin). On one level, YouTube’s categorical metrics might be seen as a dominant, structurally-driven “strategy” used to surveil and then harness the efforts of its participants, potentially exploiting them (if they are not compensated) to augment YouTube’s revenues (De Certeau). People who engage in sub for sub can be seen to be employing what De Certeau called a “tactic” that attempts to work around these structural data-collection features (36-37). In this case, the tactic of sub for sub potentially subverts the assumption that popularity, artistic merit, or some other metric should determine subscriber tallies. In the sub for sub practice, mutual subscriptions reflect a reciprocal behavior that may or may not have anything to do with the perceived merit of the participant’s videos. The interpersonal meanings behind the sub for sub practice when used in a reciprocal, helping relationship are highly unlikely to be “seen” by YouTube, since it is only concerned with the metric of an increased increment in a channel’s subscribers. Even then, it needs to see orders of magnitude increases before the practice will “matter” within its commodified entertainment structure.

People held different attitudes with respect to the legitimacy of sub for sub. While many people expressed frustration with the practice, others lauded it as a tactic in De Certeau’s sense that interpersonally helped other people gain attention for their work. One woman with whom I spoke at a Midwest gathering had a very positive reaction to the notion of sub for sub, in fact, taking a certain amount of responsibility for its proliferation. She explains:

spricket24: I would like to say that I pioneered that. I have a video from when I first started where I was like if you sub to me I’m gonna sub to you. But after I reached 3,000, I couldn’t keep up! So I think it’s cool that people are still doing sub for sub. And I think that as long as you post videos that you are proud to post and you’re happy about them, and it’s not like filled with hate speech or it doesn’t hurt anybody else, then, sub for sub is great. But if I land on someone’s page for sub for sub and they have bad videos, I will not sub. I will block that person, and I’m not afraid to do it. More people should not be afraid to block people. It’s a good tool.

Interestingly, spricket24 eventually found success on YouTube. She was delighted to be “discovered” through YouTube. She told me in an interview that her popularity on the site enabled her to parlay her effort into paid work as an actress. She eventually hired an agent and manager and was looking forward to her acting jobs. In this sense, she was able to parlay fun experiences to find more personally rewarding “work.” Radin makes the distinction between “work,” which includes nonmarket intangibles such as feelings of pride, enjoyment, and self-actualization, and inhumane, alienated “labor” which is effort expended to earn a pay check and achieve those intangibles only after the day’s labor is done.

For spricket24, her plan worked in that the sub for sub practice in part gave her a jump start to increased visibility on the site and led to more satisfactory life work that included being paid for producing entertainment. However, after obtaining 3,000 mutual subscriber/subscription relationships and a continuously flooded in box of additional requests, she said that she “couldn’t keep up.” According to her channel page, she joined on August 23, 2006, and as of January 7, 2010, she had 110,370 subscribers. Note that on YouTube’s “Most Subscribed” of all time list, the 120th channel had, as of January 2010, 182,246 subscribers. Her videos regularly receive tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. The idea that a few thousand requests complicated her ability to continue a reciprocal subscription arrangement seems to bolster Lewis Hyde’s notion that beyond a thousand people, it becomes far more difficult to sustain quieter, reciprocal helping practices (115-116).

Of course, even if it gave her a substantial initial boost, the sub for sub practice was surely not the only factor in her success, given that she is considered by her fans to be beautiful and talented. Many people respond favorably to the humor, originality, and creativity in her videos. Notably, discourses of merit are emphasized even within her rhetorical advocacy of the sub for sub practice. She states that if someone has “bad” videos then she will not follow through the reciprocal arrangement, thus privileging creative integrity over tactically lending someone a hand. By not subscribing to someone who makes sub par videos, she ostensibly raises the creative integrity of herself and YouTube by refusing to give a bad video unearned attention, and declining to display support of the video on her channel page subscription list.

In a similar vein, a video advocating the practice makes similar positive remarks, not only about receiving attention but justifying the practice as a way to make personal connections with people on the site. In a video entitled “sub4sub?” which was posted on YouTube March 28, 2008, a participant known as “Ontus” extols the virtues of the practice. As of January 7, 2010 this video had 11,629 views, a 4.5 star rating (with 279 ratings), 10 video responses, and 853 comments. Ontus explains the merits of sub for sub:

Ontus: I think it’s totally brilliant, um, I think it’s awesome. It’s a good way to get out there on YouTube and meet different people, um see different videos, find out about other people. Um, and you’re connected to ‘em. They’re a subscriber. So, it doesn’t mean they’re going to watch your videos, I know. But um you have a heck of a lot more people that are going to watch your videos. Because you’re being proactive. And that’s totally cool…I was stuck at 73 subscribers and now I’m at like over 200, which is incredible. Take it maybe half of them won’t watch my videos. But the other half will and that’s more than what I had before…So I think it’s a great way to get your videos out there and viewed, um and to meet people...If you do put out a great video, I think it has more of a chance to get out and be viewed and favorited and it will spread a lot faster because you have such a launch pad of subscribers now. So I think sub for sub is totally awesome.

Note that much of Ontus’s data in supporting the practice is quantitative; he is focused on his numbers and how the practice will improve them. Still, his justification includes the benefits of sociality, and “[meeting] different people.”

However, this practice was a contested concept on the site. Many people expressed frustration with the sub for sub concept because they saw it as a way to gain advantage whether or not the requester’s videos actually merited increased attention. Another interviewee expressed the more widespread negative feeling I observed that people held for sub for sub:

musosf: In my case that, that just pisses me off because I…that’s not what it’s about for me. It’s not about let’s try to [have that], that number, that, that statistic of I’ve got the most subscribers or I’ve got more subscribers than you. That actually conflicts with the whole friendship aspect. It’s like it’s not a competition, it’s making friends, and some of my friends have a lot more subscribers than I have and they probably always will. And some of my friends have fewer than I have and some of them have changed and we’ve swapped places. And so, yeah, so that annoys me cause that’s not why I’m there, it’s not why my friends are there, and so I just either ignore those things or delete ‘em. They bug me.

Note how musosf inscribes a discourse of metrics, quantity, impersonalization, and an improper privileging of competition over friendship on the sub for sub practice. In contrast to spricket24 and Ontus, musosf argues that it becomes about achieving an impersonal number rather than getting to know people through videos. It also conflicts with notions of merit. Musosf is well aware that at different times he may have different numbers of subscribers in comparison to his friends. This lack of isomorphism between his number of friends and subscriptions implies that friendship is an insufficient criteria for deciding to subscribe to someone else. If he and his friends all subscribed to each other out of friendship rather than video merit, then presumably they would have similar subscription numbers.

His discourse implies that merit, creativity, and personal interest are better indicators of whether or not someone should subscribe to someone else’s channel than friendship. Agreeing to this practice, he argues, descends participants into an obsession with statistics and metrics. Even if these metrics exist in an economy of attention that is not monied (e.g. they do not receive ad revenues from YouTube), they nevertheless represent competition for attention in ways that set up an impersonal relationship between the video maker and leagues of unknown viewers. Video makers who wish to achieve wide numbers of viewers as their only or main goal miss the point of stimulating a creative community within which many people wish to interact.

Most people I spoke to at one time or another have received a sub for sub request. But subscribing and perhaps also displaying this subscription on one’s channel page is a decision that requires various considerations. Although much of the scholarly discourse on reciprocity in digital environments draws on selected lines of anthropological research to emphasize the positive benefits of exchange, it is important to note that several anthropologists argue that the things people choose to withhold in cycles of exchange are just as important for society maintenance and integrity as that which they reciprocally share (Weiner; Godelier). A sense of personal creative integrity is privileged over engaging in reciprocal practices that would benefit someone’s visibility at the expense of the site’s projection of quality and creativity.

Even the mere offer of a sub for sub arrangement can feel less warm and personal and may resemble what Yunxiang Yan calls an “instrumental gift.” According to Yan, instrumental gifts “attain utilitarian ends (involving the manipulation of interpersonal relations in the short term),” whereas “expressive gifts” are “ends in and of themselves—thus reflecting long-term relationships” (218). For Yan, the instrumentalized gift is a “quasi-commodity,” “because it is transacted only for maximizing personal interests and is reciprocated by another similarly instrumentalized return (goods, favor, service, or whatever) rather than a gift” (219). Even if people subscribe back, they may do so to receive a similar quasi-commodified increase in subscription tallies or view counts, rather than to establish a relationship or even a genuine interaction. People often react negatively to the sub for sub request as if it were focused on getting something out of the subscriber, rather than engaging in a personalized exchange.

In one very revealing video posted to YouTube, a video creator parodies the practice and reveals its problematics by symbolically translating a “sub” as in “subscription” into a visual representation in the form of bread from a “submarine” sandwich. This video is entitled, “SUB FOR SUB?” and was posted by smokingmonkeyvideos on January 9, 2009. As of January 8, 2010, the video had 7,500 views, 358 text comments, 2 video responses, and sported a 4.5 star rating (based on 270 ratings). Billed in its description as “A simple comedy about sub for sub,” the video has two main characters whom I will call Participant #1 and Participant #2. They are interacting remotely, chatting on a computer.

Participant #1 wears a knit hat, glasses with lenses held together by tape, and a shirt with a hockey emblem over a Canadian maple leaf. Sporting a vacuous expression and often opening and closing his mouth pointlessly, he is coded in this video as shallow and dopey. It is unclear why the video’s creator used ethnocentric Canadian symbolism to connote stupidity. Perhaps it is used to code the “foreignness” of those who advocate sub for sub. The character, who requests a “SUB FOR SUB?” from Participant #2 clearly annoys the second participant. Structurally, the video cuts back forth through requests and responses as each sits and types message to the other through their computers.

For the first part of the video Participant #2 denies Participant #1’s requests for reciprocity in the form of sub for sub or any other offer, even threatening physical abuse if he does not desist in his requests. Finally, Participant #1 asks, “WHAT IF I GIVE YOU 2 SUBS FOR 1?” In a way this is a puzzling offer because a person can only give another person one subscription. Once they have hit the “subscribe” button, the participant has officially subscribed. Of course one could create another account and subscribe, or persuade a third party to subscribe to Participant #2, but the video has already coded Participant #1 as fairly unintelligent, so a more plausible interpretation is that he is making a preposterous offer. Participant #2 is mysteriously persuaded by this offer (no doubt a structural move in order to depict the humorous, visually-depicted “bread” exchange to follow). After capitulating, he asks Participant #1 to send his sub “first,” most likely to avoid a situation in which he subs but does not receive a sub back, a sorry state of affairs that some people on YouTube have complained about. It is a form of trickery that only boosts numbers for a short time, as those who notice what has happened can certainly then unsubscribe. To unsubscribe, one merely clicks the “unsubscribe” button.

Participant #1 then proceeds to shove two pieces of bread, which might be used in a submarine sandwich, into his computer where it presumably travels over a network to his interlocutor. Participant #2 receives them on his end, literally pulling the bread out of his laptop. With a facile expression, a cheer, and a puerile clapping motion, Participant #1 expresses excitement, and then requests to receive his “sub.” Participant #2 shoves his “sub” through the screen to Participant #1, who, after receiving it, smells it, licks it, waggles his tongue, and gives a “thumbs up,” indicating that the sub is “good.” The licking motions further code Participant #1 as odd, since most people eat, rather than lick, a submarine sandwich.

On the other end, Participant #2 bites into his “sub” and takes on an uncomfortable facial expression. He chews slowly, and almost immediately begins expelling the bread from his mouth. He looks at the sandwich, opens it, and peers inside. He spits out the bread that he has bitten off, and then reveals the contents of the sub to the camera. The sub-as-sandwich is empty. The image cuts back to Participant #1 who seems gleeful as he next clicks the “unsubscribe button” thus revoking his agreement to reciprocate.

In nearly every shot, the video cleverly quotes many YouTube participants’ negative attitudes about the practice of sub for sub. First, Participant #1 “badgers” Participant #2, finally going to the desperation point of asking, “ANYTHING FOR ANYTHING?” which shows a need to get something out of Participant #2 for his own ends. It privileges a thing, a subscription, as more valuable than actual, genuine, personalized interaction between them. Participant #1 is clearly going for an instrumental gift, one that is meant to benefit him alone. He gleefully receives the sub, but “appraises” it in a way that casts doubt on his ability to know whether or not a subscription is any good. He licks it (is that how you “judge” the quality of a sandwich?) and then decides that it gets the “thumbs up.” Metaphorically, the message is that Participant #1 does not know the difference between a good subscription and a bad one; he is incapable of determining whether another participant’s work is worth a subscription.

On the other hand, Participant #2 almost immediately understands, as indexed by his facial expression and the way he spits out the bread, that Participant #1’s sub is actually quite repellant. This reaction could symbolically illustrate the repugnance he feels for the other’s work (in terms of videos posted) or for the interaction itself. Either way, Participant #2 quickly realizes that there is nothing of substance in Participant #1’s “sub.” The big reveal and close up on the empty bread symbolically depict Participant #1’s actual contribution to the interaction (and arguably also to YouTube as whole)—which is nothing.

The video also expresses a concern about how some people use the reciprocal sub for sub request in a deceptive way. Requesters on YouTube have reportedly asked hundreds of people to subscribe, only to systematically unsubscribe to everyone who agreed to reciprocate. This practice is arguably pointless, since it may give the requester only a very temporary advantage. The ruse could easily be discovered and righted (as someone could then proceed to unsubscribe to the requester by clicking a button). The idea is that even for a brief moment, they may have a shot at increased visibility if they can appear on a “Most Subscribed” list. Further, some people may not be closely watching their account, and the asymmetrical increase may stand for a while.

This behavior is a classic illustration of what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins termed “negative reciprocity,” which he defines as the “attempt to get something for nothing with impunity,” wherein transactions are “conducted toward net utilitarian advantage” (195). Characterizing it as the most “impersonal” kind of exchange, Sahlins says that one or both parties approach the interaction “as opposed interests” seeking the “unearned increment” (195). Here, reciprocity is impersonal, adversarial, violative, and arguably does little or nothing to strengthen dyadic interactional bonds, much less those of anonymous others in the creative community. Indeed, the video described above codes the first participant’s aims as utilitarian and impersonal. People supporting such a practice, according to this video, may certainly give someone else a boost (even if a temporary one), but likely at the expense of increasing visibility for unworthy work. Such a practice detracts from, rather than raises the bar of creative integrity for the site as a whole.