Several rhetorical strategies analyze complementarities and confrontations between markets and voluntary reciprocal exchanges. These analyses may focus on their separateness or on their blurriness, but often they assume that the interaction itself is viewed one way or the other by interactional participants. For instance, supermarkets usually facilitate impersonal commodity exchanges; birthday gift exchanges are often voluntary and personalized. When one goes into a supermarket, one does not expect the supermarket check-out clerk to give them a gift or vice versa. Customers may receive a “coupon” issued by the corporate entity of the store. However, this is not usually an interpersonal gift exchanged between the shopper and the clerk; it is a marketing tool to attract additional commodified exchanges. On the other hand, birthday gifts are often voluntary between peers; friends typically do not expect a check as payment for purchasing a birthday gift. Similarly, on YouTube, when two friends decide to watch each other’s videos and give feedback, friends do not typically expect that their time will be monetarily compensated. No invoices or payments are exchanged.

One rhetorical strategy in understanding exchanges in digital environments is to emphasize the differences between market and reciprocal exchanges. Many scholars focus analytical energy on investigating how nonmarket, reciprocal exchanges offer positive benefits that markets cannot provide. This type of analysis stresses the categories’ separateness, insofar as market practices (such as leaving a check on the table after a dinner party) would pollute interpersonal relationships upon which reciprocity is based (Benkler). A YouTube participant would likely be surprised if a video maker sent them a check after the participant viewed their video and provided feedback as a courtesy. Although this rhetorical strategy acknowledges instances of blurriness—such as when IBM employs specialists to create platforms from open source, nonmarket development—this framework generally emphasizes the positive effects of lending resources or time (Benkler). These nonmarket exchanges, it is argued, stimulate creativity, increase overall efficiency of information generation and distribution, and facilitate self actualization by enabling people to pursue important interests that lie outside of employed work (Benkler; Petersen; Lange and Ito). In a nutshell, reciprocal behaviors between peers are coded as “good.” For example, in the case of certain fandoms, exchanging creative artifacts such as stories or videos produced by a close-knit group of fans is advantageous given that participants may be sensitive to publicly circulating copyrighted material. Such practices help participants have fun and creatively express themselves in ways that “deliberately [repudiate] a monetary model” (Hellekson 116).

This line of argument about collective good tends to stress the positive aspects of anonymous giving and reciprocal exchange, rather than exploring how reciprocal giving practices may be controversial or contested (Osteen). Yet, reciprocal exchanges may be problematic, as will be argued below in certain cases on YouTube. The fruits of an individual’s labors may be used in ways that do not necessarily benefit all interactants equally (Mauss; Sahlins). Anthropologists have shown that giving something often implies an obligation that the giver expects to be addressed in the future (Douglas). Many authors build their case about the positive aspects of reciprocity by using Mauss’s classic definition of a reciprocal giving cycle in which there is an obligation to give, receive, and reciprocate. Scholars draw on selective aspects of Mauss’s model to stress the positive value of being vulnerable and socially obliged to others (Hyde). However, numerous examples in the anthropological literature show that reciprocal expectations that fall outside of purely market exchanges can also be competitive, onerous, and driven by a need to accumulate asymmetrical amounts of prestige or power rather than to benefit interactants or address the common good (Mauss; Sahlins).

Another rhetorical strategy is to analytically treat certain market and nonmarket sectors as separate entities, while simultaneously recognizing that they are blurred in ways that do not benefit participants equally. For example, what is often perceived as frivolous online activity can be characterized, in many cases, as actual labor that benefits certain entities in information and entertainment industries (Terranova; Senft; Ito). Participation in the form of making videos, leaving comments, and interacting is “translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (Terranova 37). For example, a person may make a video on YouTube for fun, say of his/her cat playing the piano. The video may suddenly receive millions of views. In the early days of YouTube, when only very popular video makers were invited to participate in the partner program and receive compensation (often in the form of ad revenue) for their work, most video makers were not compensated for even popular contributions. So, even though the cat video provided entertainment for many, the investment in equipment and effort would go unrewarded from a monetary perspective. Even after YouTube expanded its partnership program and enabled many more participants to share in ad revenue for a popular video, the actual amount of money received may be, according to some partners in their videos, quite minimal (say a few dollars per month). Scholars showing how market and nonmarket practices are blurred would likely argue that YouTube benefits from these successful videos in a way that exploits participants’ labor.

Imagine further that someone takes time out of their day to watch such a video and post feedback in the form of a text comment. Perhaps the feedback includes a suggestion about new equipment. Or the comment may contain advice about how to position the cat or make it easier to photograph so that the video is even more amusing. In this case, expertise is given but not compensated. If the video maker heeds the advice and buys new equipment or changes techniques in productive ways, then the video maker may have a better chance of attracting viewers. Better videos benefit the corporate entity of YouTube as more people enjoy popular videos and coming back to the site and seeing its advertisements. Higher quality videos may also benefit the video maker, who may even receive compensation in the form of ad revenue. However, the critic who voluntarily provided crucial feedback will likely never be compensated.

Scholars analyzing exploitative dynamics rightly argue that the effort is deliberately misrecognized as frivolity rather than non-paid labor even though its effects may benefit corporate entities and some individual contributors. Participants’ viewing and commenting practices, even if anonymous, or more precisely, pseudonymous, may be advantageous for an online video sharing site. These practices contribute to creating an ambience of an active and popular site. Such activity also stimulates participation and interest from advertisers, who may place ads on the site. Yet, individual contributors such as commenters routinely do not receive compensation or a share in the fruits of their effort through advertising revenue.

Reciprocal interactions and forms of online participation have been called many things, including “immaterial labor” and “affective labor." Immaterial labor is seen to produce an “immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt 94). For Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labor is “defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (132) They include skills like “computer control” as well as creative “activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion" (132). Within the category of immaterial labor, Michael Hardt more specifically defines “affective” labor as that which concerns the “creation and manipulation of affects” in a way that produces intangible, albeit corporeal products including: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community" (95-96).

In a way, the term “immaterial” is a misnomer, insofar as it leads to an assumption that there is a clean separation between creativity and affect on the one hand, and on the other, the material conditions and practices in which affect is produced and later physically instantiated. In other words, having a thought or reaction to a video and then transforming that feeling into a comment to post online is accomplished within a material framework that requires physical manipulation of a device. The motivation to post a comment might be stimulated by an affective response to a video or may spring from a need to give the video maker a sense of connectedness or accomplishment. Once this feeling becomes encoded and distributed as a comment, it becomes a materially instantiated and recognizable thing. Comments, as things, can be quantified and used as a metric for many purposes. For example, YouTube can use view counts and comment tallies to see which videos are most popular. YouTube may not care about the affective thought communicated, or the social relationship that the comment indexes, but the comment-as-thing or view-as-thing can be counted and used as one metric of video viewing consumption.

Long ago, Mauss described how reciprocal giving might include not only material things, but also service (Mauss; Carrier, "Gifts"). Since so much of affective behavior or “services” become physically instantiated in something, it can often be difficult to separate the two. For instance, as James Carrier argues, when someone gives a “gift” of a meal, is the “gift” the meal itself, the labor required to prepare it, the labor required to serve it, or perhaps some combination of these efforts ("Gifts" 122)? In the area of online participation, for instance, among LiveJournal blogging participants, Pearson distinguishes between object-gifts which include “the exchange of physical objects or monetary gifts” and “effort-gifts” which are “created through the effort, skills, or knowledge of the giver." However, because effort-gifts, which resemble the services that Mauss long ago spoke about, often have a physical instantiation on YouTube through manipulatable comments, rating systems, and measurable time spent watching them, it is inaccurate to call them “immaterial.” Rather, this category of “effort” includes producing objects, time, attention, or other physical or affective communicative behaviors that may be instantiated in physical indexes.

Scholars speaking of misrecognized labor in online sites are rightly concerned with how markets exploit the voluntarily exchanged affect, sense of community, and self-expression that many online environments are said to facilitate through comment- and video-posting mechanisms (Terranova; Andrejevic, Reality, "Exploiting"). They are understandably concerned with how such creative and voluntary labor often becomes part of an exploited online proletariat that is seduced into participation by motivations of creativity, self-expression, and intellectual immortality, when in fact participants are simply being used to further a selective group’s market ends such as recruiting cheap labor for unspectacular digital tasks (Ross) or mining creative inspiration (Arvidsson). Their participation may also be used for corporations to collect behavioral statistics for the purposes of monitoring desires and selling back those desires through advertisements (Andrejevic, Reality, "Exploiting"). Many scholars are rightly concerned about the problems that stem from such one-way appropriations of affective labor by market entities (Terranova; Hochschild).

Notably, appropriations do not move only in one direction. Carrier has also pointed out that it is possible for people to transform market items into personal possessions that reflect affect and social relationships. The “work” of “appropriation” might be defined as “converting [an] object from commodity to possession” wherein people feel a more lasting and intimate relationship with objects and how they reflect and produce social relationships ("The Work" 111). Once a commodity has been appropriated it becomes, “inalienable,” or intimately and lastingly associated with its owner, such as a broach handed down over generations (Weiner). A structural analysis would discount such personalized appropriations of commodities, and would quite likely be more concerned with the exploitative processes of commodified use of free human labor (Pauwels and Hellriegel 390). Yet, simply because objects or labor are obtained or used within a commodity system does not negate the meanings that people ascribe to such objects and interactions in ways that reveal a more personalized reciprocal exchange. In the YouTube case, for example, YouTube may see a “view” of a video as a commodification metric, but it may have quite a different meaning for two friends who pledge to view each other’s videos for mutual support. The same behavior then, is seen as both part of a market commodification system of entertainment, as well as a reciprocal exchange of two friends’ time and attention.

Some scholars argue that user-centric discourses about “community” fall in line with YouTube's intended goals to monetarily benefit from the site (Pauwels and Hellriegel 389-90). However, it is also important to understand that YouTube responds to actions of its users to profit from dynamics that it arguably did not foresee (Pauwels and Hellriegel 396; Burgess and Green 63-64). For example, despite the fact that participants eventually used the site for collaboration and community, these uses were not originally “built in” to the mechanism and features of the site, a fact which problematizes the idea that stimulating “community” was always part of YouTube's original blueprint.

As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green point out, despite its community rhetoric, YouTube's architecture does not really invite collaboration (63). When I began fieldwork in 2006, for example, YouTube did not have a “video response” feature. It became clear over time that people were responding to other people’s videos not only by posting text comments, but also by uploading a video of themselves talking about a prior video, so that videos could take on a very targeted, interpersonal, and communicative use. In interviews, creators who wanted to commercialize their work took advantage of this dynamic and deliberately began creating videos meant to stimulate responses through visual, rather than textual channels. For example, popular YouTube participants might have contests in which they asked people to post videos of their viewers engaging in an activity, or talking about personal inspirations. Eventually, a separate category was created on YouTube, so that people could self-identify their video as a “video response” to a specific video. Of course, people may or may not identify their video this way. But these kinds of interactions between actual usage and newly-added, hard-coded features illustrate how practices and meanings are mutually influenced by participants and YouTube.

These differences in understandings of how the site should be used necessitate an ethnographic investigation that explores the contestations over the meaning of practices in particular reciprocal encounters on YouTube. Clearly, YouTube benefits from the free labor of its contributors, but not all of the contributors attach the same meanings to their efforts. To explore these nuanced ideas about reciprocity and market entanglements, the following analysis draws on data from more than 100 videos, interviews of more than 150 participants, and direct participation through my YouTube account (called AnthroVlog), in which I posted at least one video per week for one year. I also attended in-person, YouTube meet-ups across the United States. The study incorporates material from a range of participant types with varying levels of popularity. For example, the analysis considers practices of people receiving millions of views on their videos (as amassed over a few days or weeks) as well as behaviors of creators with very small view counts in the hundreds or less (as amassed over months or years).

The following discussion acknowledges the applicability of discourses that recognize both the benefits and problems of reciprocal behaviors that are entangled with a corporate agenda. The article will examine peer-to-peer contestations about the meaning of certain reciprocal behaviors on the site. Not all interactants judge particular behaviors, whether they emerge from reciprocal gifting or market commodification of entertainment as automatically “good” or “bad.” Some may welcome paid compensation and happily participate in a commodified entertainment structure, while others eschew what they perceive as harmful peer-to-peer reciprocal practices. The following discussion will examine contested discourses about three specific practices: 1) posting comments; 2) subscribing to other YouTube participants; and 3) deleting one’s videos. It will investigate how particular problems emerge when different interactants within the same encounter hold dissimilar views about the meaning of reciprocity on YouTube.

YouTube is a system that enables people to post videos and comments in ways that may help people express creativity and sociality. Viewers may post text comments or video responses to a video on the site. In a video response, a person may record themselves talking about the prior video, expressing their agreement or disagreement, for example. Sometimes video “responses” are just videos that they want YouTube to link to a particular prior video. Often, people comment or respond to videos in order to express some affinity for the video’s contents or for the video maker. At the same time, YouTube collects certain metrics derived from user efforts (such as watching videos and posting comments) that can help determine which creators are more popular than others. YouTube enables people to search for videos using certain categories, such as “Most Viewed” and “Most Discussed” for different periods of time such as that day, that week, that month, and cumulatively of “all time” (i.e. as long as YouTube has measured these statistics).² If a video is highly discussed with comparatively many more comments being posted in a particular time period, it will receive additional visibility by being placed in the “Most Discussed” category. In this way, people casually coming to the site may view top-rated videos in particular categories to see what is popular. Of course, this increases the visibility of an already-popular video, and potentially also increases the popularity of a video creator.

In 2007, YouTube invited a select few popular participants to become “partners” in a revenue-sharing plan based in part on advertisements placed on videos (Riley). Later in 2007, YouTube expanded the program to include a much broader range of participants, provided that they uploaded original content on videos that received substantial numbers of views (presumably at least in the thousands) (McCollum; Kirkpatrick). Partners were reportedly chosen for their visibility on the site (as measured by views and subscribers), as they would logically be more attractive to advertisers. These partners receive far higher orders of magnitude in views and comments than other participants. In my ethnographic observation, popular participants or partners routinely have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views on their videos after several weeks or even a few days, with each video receiving thousands of comments. Further, many early partners at one time or another had at least a few videos that received several million views. These figures contrast sharply with many other participants who may receive on the order of several hundred views, and dozens of comments on any particular video.

Metrics such as views, subscriptions, and comment tallies can become physical ways to gauge a certain measure of popularity and opportunities for ad revenue. In terms of revenue, some of the more successful partners have reportedly received thousands of dollars per month from ad revenue on their videos on YouTube (Stelter). In August of 2009, YouTube further expanded opportunities to receive compensation by enabling uploaders to activate ad sharing for single successful videos, without necessarily inviting the uploader to receive all partner benefits (Adegoke; Kincaid). If a particular video sees an increase in views, the uploader of the video might receive notification that they may “enable revenue sharing.” Nevertheless, even many uploaders with a single or a few successful videos report seeing only a small amount of money (some claim receiving less than $50 per month) in ad revenue. Further, people who post text comments—whether these comments are considered useless or thoughtful—receive no monetary compensation from YouTube for their effort.

People presumably feel motivated to comment to participate, maintain a social presence on the site, give a favorite video maker a boost, or register their opinion in some way. People posting creative or affective text comments or video responses to other videos often wish to contribute and respond to something they have seen in videos or in other comments posted to videos. Comment systems represent a series of interactions with the video creator or others who post textual replies to videos and comments. In interviews, it became apparent that a creator’s perspective on the comments they received often illustrated their reasons for participating on the site. For example, some people use YouTube as a way to improve their video making skills and to gain visibility in the hopes of professionalizing their work. A few creators whom I interviewed welcomed all kinds of commentary, whether positive or negative, because in their view, such comments increased their comment tallies and visibility on the site. According to this view, even “hater” comments served a utilitarian purpose for them. “Haters” were routinely defined in interviews as people who post pointlessly negative or mean-spirited comments that offer no useful criticism or information, such as in the stock phrases, “You suck,” or “Go die” (Lange "Commenting"). Often haters use more forceful language and even harsher criticism. High comment tallies, including those with hater comments, could land a video on YouTube's sorted category of “Most Discussed.” Therefore, receiving many comments was often quite important to them.

However, in most ethnographic interviews, participants did not welcome hateful comments. Even many participants who wished to commercialize their work or become a professional in entertainment or media industries said that hater comments complicated the YouTube environment. Many people, even those who were highly successful partners with hundreds of thousands of views on their videos, saw the hater postings as a problem for YouTube in general (Lange "Commenting"). A number of people felt it important, nevertheless, to leave most commentary on their pages, as a sign of their commitment to free speech (Lange "Commenting"). However, many people also expressed the view that they would delete hateful postings if they exhibited racism, sexism, homophobia or other types of extremely undesirable commentary. A few participants acknowledged that leaving such commentary on a video page was important in order to be “popular.” Indeed, as creators become more popular it becomes harder to sift through each of the thousands of comments that are posted to a video.

Importantly, many people viewed the comment system far more personally, as a crucial part of YouTube participation and social interaction. Whereas view counts may be accumulated by any casual viewer’s effort, people are required to have an account to post comments. Having an account includes having at least a minimal social presence on the site, in the form of a “channel” page, which is the YouTube page of a creator. A creator is usually a person, but it could also represent an organization or media corporation. The channel page includes information that the user provides (such as their online account name, interests, age, and other voluntary information) and statistics that YouTube tracks, such as when they joined, how many subscribers they have, and how many people have looked at their channel page since they joined. Certainly people can maintain a “shell” account with minimal or false information. But such behavior would not likely attract additional social encounters.

Many interviewees expressed the view that it was desirable to reciprocate and comment on the comments that people posted to their videos. In this way, a dialogue ensues. An uploader posts a video, someone else posts a comment to that video, and the uploader may react and answer the comment with another text comment. Commenters may also react to other commenters. For a few participants, such a reciprocal practice of reacting to comments felt like an obligation, in a positive, polite sense. For most others interviewed, posting text comments was simply a way of engaging with others, meeting people, being polite, or participating in what they termed the YouTube “community.”

In one of the most extreme positions along this vein, one participant named “myloflex” told me in an interview that he felt it proper to respond to each and every comment that was left on his videos. Myloflex was not alone in this practice, but it did not represent the majority of interviewee’s views. Myloflex noted that this type of reciprocity could create tension for some people on the site. During our interview, I asked him if there were any features he would like to see YouTube change. He responded:

myloflex: There’s one thing I would like. I don’t know if they’ve done it yet, is if I reply on my video to other people’s comments it counts as [part of the comment tally]. I think they should get rid of that because a lot of times people get upset that if you get a lot of comments, obviously the person making the video will answer every one and then they get moved up on the list of comment replies. I’m the kind of person [that] if you spend the time to write to me I’m going to write back because I appreciate your watching and taking the time to write, so [I’ll] write back and the last thing I need is someone to say “this guy’s just trying to get his video up there because he’s replying to everybody” and calling me, what’s the word, “comment spammer” [I guess]. That’s one thing I think they should get rid of…I’ve seen one video where someone says “so-and-so sucks” on their own video a hundred fifty thousand times, they get their video up there just so someone can see it.

In this example, myloflex feels that he should personally respond to the comments that are posted on the page. He even generalizes his personal perception by saying “obviously” the video maker “will answer every one.” He implies that his behavior is not idiosyncratic, in that others will feel compelled to respond to comments. However, he is aware that other people may accuse him of being a “comment spammer” in a brazen attempt to increase the comment tallies on his page. Such an interpersonal interaction of returning comments could then be used by YouTube to determine visibility, popularity, and potential participation in a commodified relationship. While myflox sees his need to reciprocally respond to people out of politeness and to honor their effort in a warm, interpersonal way, others view his practice as a marketing strategy.

Myloflex illustrates conflicting interpretations about the value and meaning behind comments-as-things. Comments can be quantifiably measured and appropriated into an economic system. Margaret Radin calls this process “incomplete commodification,” which is defined as interactions in which “commodified understandings of certain transactions can coexist with noncommodified understandings” (102). This state of affairs can be brought about when a transaction exists as a “contested concept” that is seen in different ways by different parties. These differences may be “external” to a participant in a transaction, or “internal” to a participant. In the example above, part of the conflict is external to myloflex. People other than myloflex have portrayed his need to reciprocate comments as an attempt at asymmetrical competition, which can lead to commodification, or at least to widely distributed and thus impersonal consumption of his work. Even if the issue on the table was not about increasing tallies so as to gain market revenue directly, it is nevertheless the case that people have limited amounts of time and must choose what they will watch. The parceling out of these resources requires choices, and these choices may be influenced by the metrics YouTube chooses to use. People may choose to watch what YouTube lists as most popular. It may be far easier to “find” videos by searching YouTube's lists of high-ranking videos.

In contrast, myloflex does not see his participation as a commodified or competitive practice, but rather an interpersonal one. The legitimacy of the practice for ensuring the creative integrity of YouTube is questioned by those who claim myloflex is trying to artificially boost his visibility, even though a wide ranging audience has not put effort into commenting on his videos. These participants would argue that myloflex’s reciprocity (which they might call “cheating” by “inflating” his comment tally) threatens to degrade the quality of YouTube, by potentially boosting the popularity metrics of videos that had not earned widespread attention.

But the conflict is not only external to myloflex. The contestation about what the comment-as-thing is may be experienced as an internal conflict as well, within myloflex himself. Although he does not see his own reciprocal comments as commodifications, he recognizes that reciprocal commenting practices may be used in this way. In the passage above, he admits that he has seen some people place trivial comments such as “so-and-so sucks” on their own video, in an attempt to artificially raise their visibility in either an ad-driven market, or a so-called attention economy, which may not be monied but nevertheless aims to secure limited viewership opportunities (Goldhaber, "The Value," "The Attention"). Attention is a limited resource that some video creators compete for using varying degrees of personalization. Many people would happily circulate their work to large, anonymous audiences and have little need to establish personalized interactions based on video views, much less an ongoing relationship between creator and viewer.

In this case, myloflex prefers to see his participation as genuine, rather than commodified or even commodifiable. Thus he articulated a desire for YouTube to stop counting his text responses to prior comments as part of their comment metrics. He advocates being able to re-appropriate his form of participation out of a commodified structure (Carrier "The Work"). He wishes to continue to assign his own participatory meanings without receiving social ostracization (such as being called a “comment spammer”) from those who can only see it as part of commodified structures or competitive viewing practices. The re-appropriation would mean that his reciprocal comments posted to comments on his own videos would not be counted in YouTube's metrics. For whatever reason, myloflex eventually received his wish. During the fieldwork period, YouTube changed its policy so that comments that one leaves on one’s own video are no longer counted in the comment tallies used to determine which videos are “Most Discussed” on YouTube.

It is arguably true that some participants might feel a legitimate need to catch “cheaters” who would manipulate comment systems by putting comments on their own videos. Such a practice, they might argue, would artificially inflate videos and even crowd out those of other creators who had not used these tactics but who might actually make better videos, in terms of viewer perceptions of quality. In this view reciprocity becomes “bad.” On the other hand, it is also possible that a so-called “cheater” might actually be using techniques that help a very well-crafted video finally see the visibility it deserves. However, a more widespread interpretation is that such “cheaters” feel the need to use these techniques not only because competition on YouTube is vast, but because their videos are just not that good. An argument can be made that by discouraging artificial or inauthentic forms of comment reciprocity, participants are adding to the creative integrity of YouTube as a whole by pointing out and exposing video makers who are manipulating the system in ways that promote sub-standard videos. This practice echoes what some scholars see as the anonymous practices in digital environments (e.g., Petersen) that help promote the common good, but in ways that most people on YouTube will never know about.

As a whole, it is arguably true that YouTube is an online milieu that exhibits Radin’s idea of “incomplete commodification.” Early on, people who wished to be social and not necessarily receive payment for their interactions existed alongside those who either had already or wished to commercialize their work. People who use social networks to actively promote their work and get a more enjoyable “day job” see commodification as “good.” As Radin points out, one of the differences between her conceptualizations of “work” and “labor” is that work is personal, and is not separate from a sense of self and social connection to other people. Work is not separate from others, and thus on YouTube practices such as comments and responding to comments both potentially promote the visibility of one’s work in competitive entertainment and informational economies, and also function as forms of sociality and interpersonal interaction. Some participants did not think it problematic to promote reciprocal commentary relationships if it helped them achieve a compensated métier. Others saw it as a form of cheating (especially in more blatant forms with the same stock message posted many times to increase tallies) that threatened to degrade the quality of YouTube.

Like comment systems, other YouTube features also express affect or attention. At the same time they contribute to entertainment markets or at least economies of attention in which metrics are used to promote some videos over others. As long as interactions remain within a system where both sociality and commodification are possible, instances of incomplete commodification and contestation about the meaning of reciprocal behaviors are likely to continue.

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.

Reciprocities and tensions also appear on YouTube in the form of struggles over what should be kept or deleted from what Jean Burgess and Joshua Green call an “accidental archive.” Although they were speaking about uploaded videos, their term applies to comments and video responses as well. Specifically, the concern addressed here has to do with how or whether interactions-as-things should be persistently kept on the site. Once affective feelings, thoughts, and feedback are inscribed as text and video responses on YouTube, they are things that have specific sequential histories and interactive contexts. Scholars argue that things have biographies that, when they are exchanged in reciprocal interactions, remain with the objects (e.g., Osteen; Kopytoff). Examples include sacred relics, family heirlooms, and other objects that are inalienably associated with former owners, practices, and interactional moments. In a sense, affects translated into comments and videos are inalienable, in that they are associated with the person who has given “gifts” of attention and commentary to others on the site. Even the exact same text comment, such as “This is an excellent video,” may have different interpersonal meanings when they are issued by different people. For instance, such praise may have different connotations coming from a famous YouTuber versus a close friend.

Both YouTube and individual participants may remove unwanted comments-as-things and videos-as-things from the site, for a variety of reasons. YouTube may choose to remove (or hide in the case of spam) particular videos, soundtracks of videos, comments, and channel pages that violate their terms of service. In a way, YouTube structurally offers a kind of reciprocity—they will provide a free platform (at least as of this writing in June 2010) for video exchange and interaction provided that their terms of service are not violated. However, what YouTube “owes” participants is what Radin would call a contested category that signifies incomplete commodification. Even though it takes place in a commercially-driven structure, people may assign different meanings to YouTube's structurally available features such as text comments.

In interviews and in text comments posted to videos, YouTube participants list a variety of reasons why they sometimes feel motivated to delete videos, comments, or even their whole account. In addition to removing hateful comments as noted above, videos may also be removed through glitches (both YouTube- and user-generated) and over video makers’ concerns about repercussions from violating copyright rules. Other issues include lack of viewership; concerns about privacy or self protection (as when someone detects that sensitive information inadvertently slipped into a video); a desire to reinvent one’s channel or online persona; or concerns or embarrassment over quality levels in videos appearing early in an uploader’s oeuvre.

Discussions of things like “immaterial labor” and “affective labor” can weightlessly characterize effort that is often, in fact, interpersonally instantiated in artifacts such as comments that can be saved or deleted in particular circumstances. A semiotic analogy may be made in terms of transmission of aesthetic qualities. The color red, for instance, cannot be given, only an object that is red (Keane 187). In online milieu, feelings and ideas are distributed through something that can later be manipulated by senders and receivers. Exactly what form things like support, critique, feedback, and other affective feelings take is quite significant to interactants. YouTube contains many inscribed indexes of friendships and interactions that have occurred on the site over time. Some of them have become famous within and beyond YouTube. For instance, funny videos have found their way into news reports or variety shows in ways that index certain cultural moments on the site. These indexes serve as touchstones for YouTube's cultural histories. Personal deletion choices may sometime serve to erase or complicate participants’ access to affective effort. Removals and erasures from these interactional sequences often have emotional consequences.

Whether or not collective inscriptions of sociality represent a kind of “interactional archive” depends how one uses the term “archive,” in either its colloquial connotation as a mere collection, or in the historian’s sense of a persistent, organized, and standardized collection of curated materials. Burgess and Green have dubbed YouTube an “accidental archive” (87-90) in that the site did not anticipate that legions of participants would, à la Benkler or Jenkins, devote considerable time and energy not only uploading videos as cultural materials, but also cataloging, organizing, curating, and describing them. Removal of copyrighted and other interactional materials can cause considerable grief and distress within a social group that looks to YouTube to be a stable archive of their interpersonal, reciprocal, affective effort. Indeed deletions can lead to a change in motivation for interacting on YouTube, such as leaving the site altogether or withholding certain levels of affective effort.

Tensions about deletions are well articulated in a video called “A Rant for Renetto…,” which was posted by OhCurt on August 16, 2009. As of January 9, 2010, this video received 683 views, 4 video responses, 139 text comments and a 5 star rating (which is coded as Awesome!) with 110 ratings. In this video, OhCurt, who is part of the YouTube partner program, talks about his frustration with how people become “delete happy.” He “rants” about how people seem to blithely delete videos without considering the impact on people and on the interactional, historical archive that such removals entail. One of the problems is that when a video is deleted, so too are all the text comments that were posted to that video. Further, although video responses remain on YouTube, they are no longer linked to the original video, which has been deleted. Video responses are still available on each of the original responder’s channel page, but the intertextual link between responses and the original video to which they responded is severed.

In his video, OhCurt dubs these “orphaned” videos. Such removals produce inconsistencies in the “interactional archive” that render the whole series of interactions-as-things less personal than when the biography of the interaction is integrally maintained. When comments are deleted, the commenter may feel disappointed or betrayed. One commenter to his video even asserted that such removals “violate the spirit of YouTube.” In his video, OhCurt explains his frustration:

OhCurt: Once upon a time there used to be more interaction; it used to be more where you would see video responses to and from people and at some point people started just doing their own thing and going for the views and the, [the] subscribers. “Rate, comment, subscribe,” and all that bull crap! (sighs) And so we’ve gotten away from that. You don’t see too many video responses any more…There are certain people I will never do video responses for again because when you look back on my channel and you see how many videos were actually done in response to something else, where you’re watching it and you think to yourself, “What’s he talking about? What is this? This is like half of a joke. I don’t get it, there’s nothing for me to click on to see what this is a response to, this is, there’s, I don’t know what’s going on.” That’s because there are certain people who are so delete happy…[they] just love to delete their videos, so I have a slew of orphaned video responses, and I will not add to that list by responding to certain people ever again!

As mentioned above, people have many reasons for deleting a video; some of them involve legitimate fears such as repercussions from copyright issues or security concerns. In the comments to the videos, OhCurt expresses sympathy for many of these concerns, as he himself has deleted videos for similar reasons. It is significant that he has deleted the videos even though he is keenly aware that many of them respond to other videos. His point is not to fault individuals but to express frustration over what it means to lose the community’s instantiations of interactional reciprocity over which people have exerted personalized effort. It is as if an arrangement of reciprocity is assumed; if people take the time to post text comments or videos, the understanding is that they will be left on the site and respected if at all possible. In addition, he argues that it degrades the quality of the content of the informational thread by removing parts in a sequence of interaction, thus rendering discourse threads less coherent or even unintelligible.

One of the major reasons for deletions that people list in text comments on OhCurt’s video and in ethnographic interviews has to do with maintaining one’s reputation in a way that resembles the aesthetic reputational sensitivity in Becker’s concept of an “art world.” Here, in the “media world” of YouTube, video makers are also often viewers who critique, appraise, and otherwise judge people’s video-based artifacts of creativity and self expression. Contrary to popular opinion, press reports, and even some academic treatments, YouTube is not simply made of a hopeless batch of exceedingly poor videos that out number high-quality professional works (Keen; Long; Kinder; Sherman). Long argues that YouTube simply encourages “lame personal video contributions and pathetic searches for friendship” (Long). Sherman asserts that YouTube videos contain no “aesthetics,” but rather exhibit only a kind of "anesthetic" which is crude, lacks "aesthetic awareness," and "numbs or subdues perception" (163).

However, quite a range of quality exists on YouTube, just as it does in professional filmmaking milieu. Individual YouTube participants often see improvement in their work over time. Video creators have told me that they also enjoy seeing their fellow creators improve, and they can detect specific improvements as a video maker becomes more experienced. For a number of people, making videos frequently is seen as one way to improve one’s craft. Indeed the late director Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient said in an interview that many people in the film-viewing public are actually quite “film literate,” as they are “steeped in the literacy of the moving image” (Hoyle).

On the one hand, it is not surprising that one of the reasons that YouTube participants may wish to delete videos is that they feel self-conscious about the quality of prior work. As one commenter to OhCurt’s video put it:

I think I've only deleted 3 or 4 videos max during my time on [YouTube] and I get relatively few responses. That said, I took them down because I just didn't consider them good enough...but maybe that was being unfair to myself because when originally posted I was proud of them...

This commenter is careful to note that they have only deleted a few videos, and even these received few responses, thus their social transgression is not severe. Notably, when the videos were originally posted, this creator felt a sense of pride. Some people feel that YouTube is a kind of open, networked, “sketchbook” where people can experiment with their creativity and receive feedback. Over time, as more skills are learned, this poster felt that older material was not “good enough” to exhibit publicly. In other commenters’ accounts and justifications, some people said they only removed videos with few or no comments. Some admitted that they did not stop to consider that the comments’ continuing existence might be socially important. Still others were well aware that they were “orphaning” videos and removing text comments from the interactional archive when they deleted a video, but their needs outweighed reciprocal concerns.

Participants who deleted videos for reasons of reputational quality arguably privileged a sense of personal, creative integrity over honoring the reciprocal affective effort that their fellow YouTube participants took the time and trouble to provide them (without being compensated). Is it possible that such participants were exploited by their fellow YouTube participants? The video creators received what they needed in terms of support, critique, or feedback, but deleted the effort when it suited them. As has been observed, YouTube contributors are concerned about issues of quality in their work (Lange "Publicly;" Müller). For some people, it is ultimately worse (for the individual and possibly also for YouTube as a whole, depending upon how much participants strive to improve YouTube’s online reputation) to leave up sub par videos than to remove reciprocal indexes of affective effort. They are willing to remove these substandard videos, even though this practice may vex those who spent considerable energy and time in viewing and commenting on the videos, and supporting—in a more personal way—the creative efforts of their fellow YouTubers.

The discussion above has important theoretical implications with regard to studying the meanings of reciprocity, online discourse, and effort in digital environments. Whereas much of prior scholarship characterized reciprocity as something “good” or advantageous and commodified relationships as “bad” or exploitative for online groups, the findings suggest that participants do not always perceive these categories in such a binary way. People in the study who wished to pursue their dream occupation were often very pleased that YouTube offered a way for them to gain visibility for their work, which could lead to pursuing a cherished professional métier. In a reciprocal arrangement with YouTube, some participants who posted videos and complied with the terms of service were successful enough to receive compensation from YouTube (through ad revenue, for instance) for their work. Rather than mechanically “labor” to earn a living during the day while pursuing their real interests as a hobby after hours, some YouTube participants embraced the idea that revenue shared with YouTube could enable them to pursue preferred lines of work that facilitated joy and self expression (Radin). They benefited from social relationships on the site that assisted in achieving their professional goals.

On the other side of the coin, reciprocal behaviors were not always perceived as a panacea and as a universally preferred method of interacting on YouTube. In certain important ways, people often privileged notions of promoting high quality videos over friendship bonds as indexed through reciprocal helping practices. In some cases, ideas about honoring the contribution of others (such as leaving thoughtful comments on a video) were deemed as less important than projecting respected reputations of quality. It was better to delete a low-quality video, even if that meant jettisoning reciprocal contributions of viewers who took the time and effort to contribute to one’s YouTube project. Some participants also viewed certain antagonistic forms of reciprocal behaviors rather cynically, as not indexing helping or friendship, but rather as a method for focusing on quantifiable metrics in commodified or at least impersonal relationships with viewers, rather than on sincere, interpersonal interaction.

These findings suggests that in future studies, scholars should attend closely to the meanings that individuals ascribe to particular behaviors, rather than assume they will be perceived in particular ways based on their structural position in a commodified entertainment platform. Certainly future studies should attend to the ways in which sites that intermingle the commercial with the social may exploit the supposedly ephemeral contributions of its participants. At the same time however, exploitation may manifest not only through structural, top-down entities. In online environments, the very same act can be perceived in different ways by different parties to the interaction. Scholars should pursue rather than ignore exploration of these contested categories, which will likely reveal much about online cultures and individual desires of participants.

The philosophical debate about whether it is possible to speak of true “reciprocity” in cases where behaviors are self-serving will likely continue. Yet, anthropological perspectives that acknowledge possible asymmetrical forms of reciprocity may offer important insights into particular online cultures and the forms of exploitation that may emerge not only from top-down entities, but from well-meaning peers. Scholars should closely examine the contested meanings, appropriations, and re-appropriations of “things” such as comments, video responses, and subscription pledges, rather than assume that their only analytical interest lies in their market value and exploitability potential. Further, scholars should attend not only to obvious reciprocal exchanges such as the practice of “sub for sub,” but should also investigate more subtle forms of reciprocal understandings about providing feedback and what participants’ expectations are regarding the permanence of such feedback in the interactional archive.

The research also aimed to broaden theoretical understanding of so-called “immaterial” and “affective” labor. In the first decades of online research, it has become all too easy to over-generalize and romanticize the digitized aspect of online interaction. Yet a close inspection quickly reveals that much of what is termed “immaterial” labor has quite physical, tangible roots. When such tangible practices are ignored in scholarly research, the potential to create analytical misconceptions about individual contributions increases. For instance, purchasing a camera and equipment, learning to use that equipment, and then gaining the ability to post a video are all quite tangible enterprises with a price tag that indexes material investments and time expended. Scholars should not confuse ephemerality with immateriality. Because something can be removed easily does not mean it has no material sources or physical interconnections. In fact, that comments and other types of online response can be manipulated highlights rather than negates a sense of their physical materiality. We cannot touch a feeling, perhaps, but we can delete a comment on a physical system through a device. If materiality is defined through the potential of sensory engagements and impacts on the body, then a comment-as-thing is something that the body engages with. It can be measured and manipulated in ways that benefit some participants, but may exclude others. Affective or immaterial effort becomes expressed through tangible things that have physical and aesthetic qualities. Seeing such affective effort as “frivolous” or “virtual” simply because it is digitized online potentially leads to an underestimation of their effects and impact, especially if they are unceremoniously excised from YouTube’s interactional history.

This research also challenges prior discourses that claim that YouTube participants are unaware of or uninterested in improving their work and attending to quality. Popular and scholarly discourses often point to YouTube’s ad hoc arrangement as proof that so-called amateurs eschew a drive toward maintaining quality for their work or the site as a whole. In the case of YouTube, withholdings of certain forms of reciprocity show that many people attend to quality and wish to maintain reputational, creative integrity for individuals or for the site as a whole. In video discourse, text comments, and interviews, participants often displayed sensitivity to their media-making abilities and reputation and they sometimes privileged their media-making persona over lending a “helping hand” to a fellow YouTuber. Most people would quite likely feel sympathy for someone who wishes to remove a “poor quality” video from their online oeuvre. However, at the same time, such decisions have tangible and emotional impacts on people who have spent time and effort translating their affect into material efforts. Despite the rhetoric of YouTube as having no aesthetics, such contestations over reciprocity demonstrate that video creators’ abilities exist on a moving trajectory, and removals may be used to highlight personal reputations even at the risk of aggravating friends and supporters.

The data also suggest that it is time to reconsider the theoretical implications of studying “texts” such as videos as stand-alone phenomena. Seen from a social perspective, text comments and video responses to videos are part of interactional biographies that have particular meaning to those participants who choose to use YouTube or other creative sites in social ways. Studies of YouTube are typically concerned with analyzing videos; such studies regard text comments and videos that are posted to other videos as ancillary or parasitic. But for some participants, comments and video responses are as important to the structure and participation matrix of YouTube as are the original videos to which these rejoinders were posted. Text comments are not simply “text,” they are, in certain circumstances, indexes of interaction that deserve consideration as part of what constitutes “YouTube.”

Privileging a video or channel as the central focus of interaction also has key design implications. The ego-centric design of so-called “social” network sites implies that with a touch of a button, a single video creator is empowered to erase complex historical records of interaction from the archive—a loss which may be keenly felt by some participants. While some comments and video responses may not be given much thought, some people on YouTube have used the site to interact and provide important forms of creative, social, and emotional support. YouTube is not just an “accidental archive” of videos, but also of texts that index certain forms of sociality. Treating these contributions as far less important than the original videos to which they are posted may have participatory ramifications. Future online social sites would do well to pay attention to how peer-to-peer forms of effort are treated. Seeing their social contributions devalued may discourage active participants from contributing the very forms of effort that have made YouTube an interesting site worth watching.

1. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006 (Burgess and Green 1; Sorkin and Peters).

2. YouTube tends to change its features somewhat frequently. For example, for the first few years it used a “star” rating system, in which people could rate videos from 1 star (“Poor”) to 5 stars (“Awesome!”). In 2010, this was replaced by a simple thumbs up (like) or thumbs down (dislike) metric (Kincaid). The rationale was that people tended to rate videos with 5 stars, and sometimes 1 star, but very few in between (YouTube Blog). The bulk of the discussion, unless otherwise noted, refers to YouTube as it appeared during the majority of the fieldwork period, 2006-2008.

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