We got our start long before the party moved to YouTube.

It makes me feel old to say this, but a significant chunk of my life took place in a pre-YouTube era. In the early days, the audience for our movies was very small: it was just us. Movie premieres were special occasions that took place in the living room. DVDs were home-burned and handed out to friends and family one at a time. The concept of shoving an entire film through our parents’ flimsy phone line onto the Internet for the benefit of thousands of eyeballs was technologically inconceivable.

Then YouTube came along and changed everything.

Suddenly, we realized we were not alone. There were others like us – kids and teenagers making movies in their kitchens and backyards, just for the fun of it. Sure, maybe it was also to start gathering online fan followings, but it really felt like ars artis gratia in the beginning. Even the bigger channels (see early Smosh) had playful, “aw shucks” shoestring-budget vibes to them.

But YouTube kept evolving.

I don’t think I could clearly put my finger on the moment when I realized YouTube had become unrecognizable from what had made it so appealing to me in the late 2000s. It probably wasn’t even a single moment, really – it was more like death by a thousand cuts.

“Don’t worry, we’ll tell you what to watch next,” said YouTube. “You’re not allowed to see how many dislikes a video has,” said YouTube. “Shut up and watch these two six-second advertisements before your three-second meme,” said YouTube.

Over time, YouTube mutated into a corporate hellscape, a hollowed-out husk that had completely gutted itself of everything pertaining to its former self (save for that classic logo). And then the algorithm proceeded to gorge itself on clickbait videos, on screaming wide-mouth thumbnails, on red arrows and googly-eyes, on bot-generated garbage.

But at the end of the day, YouTube’s copyright policy was always the most painful thorn in my side. Now, I’m perfectly happy to abide by copyright laws. You can see my change in posture on copyrighted music by comparing Earthbound Episode 5 (which made heavy use of entire Beatles songs for the soundtrack, and was subsequently shot to oblivion by a barrage of calculating copyright strikes) to Earthbound Episode 6 (which was mostly comprised of original music cues that I wrote, with a slight sprinkling of Beatles). The problem came with the randomness of it all. What was okay to use in your video yesterday would become verboten tomorrow. A classic video’s soundtrack could get muted at any time, or pulled off the platform entirely. Trying to keep a legacy of early-2010s videos alive on YouTube while the copyright rules shifted under my feet was like living through a never-ending game of Russian roulette. But we had nowhere else to go, so I stayed where I was, like a battered, gaslit housewife.

Then one day, I found an opportunity to run. I ran to Odysee.

Not only do things now feel safer and more stable, but in a lot of ways, the move to Odysee feels like a return to simpler times. It’s definitely not the bygone era of living room premieres and home-burned DVDs, but it feels more akin to what YouTube used to be. A quieter place for small-time video creators to breathe and express themselves.

The move to Odysee has also given me an opportunity to finally release a lot of cool, old footage that represented either DVD-exclusive content that never made it online, or simply fun moments that slipped through the cracks and never got proper attention.

So we’re not going anywhere. Yes, our videos are going to continue to come down off of YouTube, one at a time (even Earthbound, eventually). It’s important to remember that YouTube is not a pillar of real life – it’s just another website. We had our fun, but you have to know when it’s time to leave the party.

And the party feels like it’s been over for quite some time.