cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44399155
Dude has 30k people watching his streams at all times.
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He’s always on.
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He’s conventionally handsome.
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He has above average speaking skills.
In that order.
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He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Rutgers University, including studied Marxism at University. He interned at his uncle’s new company 'The Young Turks. Then he started streaming on facebook to try to gain an independent following. It was Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House who convinced him to start streaming on twitch. Chapo promoted Hasan before he was famous on twitch and Felix would stream fortnite with Hasan. His following initially exploded during the 2020 BLM protests.
Hasan has often credited his success to being inspired by Michael Brooks, who unexpectedly died in 2020. He often quotes Michael Brooks saying ‘be kind to people, be ruthless to systems’. I think this principle is what makes him popular. He explains politics to people in simple terms and he doesn’t act like he’s better than you. He doesn’t tell people that he’s the furthest left person to ever live. He doesn’t pretend like he’s going to lead the revolution. He goes outside; he talks to people on their level; he explains socialism in ways that are easy to understand.
There seems to be a misconception that Marxism needs to be draped in esotericism. Some people feel as though they accomplished something great just by having discovered Marxism and express great importance of their own thoughts. The point of Marxism is to apply the Marxism to the real world. If you want to be popular, you have to go outside, talk to people on their own level, and explain your goals in ways that are easy to understand. If you want to be unpopular, don’t go outside, express a sense of superiority to the people you interact with, and speak with shibboleths.
Hasan is a gateway for liberals into a broader left discourse. That is his role. I used to watch Hasan a lot but have since graduated to just reading all the time.
He’s insanely (almost concerningly) active. Like streaming is his entire life. He’s usually live 10 hours a day, nearly every single day
If he streamed only 10-30 hours/week like others, people might subscribe but forget about him. If you see the same guy on your feed every damn time you open Twitch, that consistency is appealing. Almost like the gen z leftist equivalent to 24/7 live radio
I think it’s fine to like him. I think he’s more palatable than someone like the Chapo hosts, even Matt Christman, for being more digestible and not-so-academic and also semi-serious the way people who are noticing or seeking alternative diagnoses for sociological problems of the US & West.
Podcasters and media personalities are not a political or social vanguard. Brace said it himself in an episode of a podcast Fourth Reich Archaeology, where he lists himself as someone who can follow orders or assess the reality but can not prescribe solutions or actions to address the grievances and sicknesses of the masses.
Hmmmm, why is this handsome, charming guy popular? Plus He’s lib/baby leftist friendly. He’s the wide part of our funnel, such as it is.
Twitch success is primarily driven by consistency. You have to be a prolific daily streamer that is ALWAYS online. If you engage someone on one day, you need to be online and streaming at the same time that person is on the next day so they watch you and not someone else.
Secondly it’s presentation. Saying the right things in the right way for the audience to engage.
Thirdly it’s off-site engagement. Hasan is successfully reaching people with posts on all platforms, typically with short clips. These are probably created by an editor for him as part of a team.
Twitch streamer success is honestly brutal, most of the people succeeding on twitch stream every single day for 12 hours a day, they don’t take holidays, they work 360 days straight in some cases. The ones that can do less than that have some niche or pull in an audience through some other method. Yeah it’s sitting in a chair talking to a screen but the sheer consistency and neverending nature of it or getting subscriber losses is brutal.
Yeah, most people are overthinking it. Hasan streams like a complete shutin despite not looking, sounding, or acting like a complete shutin. That will obviously lead to views and subs.
The successful streamers barely go outside at all. Their whole life is streaming. It’s an incredible amount of work and an awful daily routine.
When unexpected things happen they have to extend streams beyond their usual routine too. You can’t let a good stream go until numbers go down to your average.
I think it’s an odd question to ask about anyone liking Hasan with no context. Why does anyone like Trump? Are we taking about the politics? The personality? The format?
“How can anyone on hexbear/grad like Hasan?” is a more reasonable question, and gets discussed on our site weekly. Might be best to reference this thread from 6 days ago where the discussion was pretty thorough:
the man is nice to look at
And he’s educated and explains his views in easy to understand ways.
And he puts his money where his mouth is.
he puts his money where his mouth is.
in what context? I don’t watch him so I honestly don’t k ow. The only thing I’ve seen him put his money toward was a multi million dollar home and some sorta bougie clothes.
I’m not being facetious I really don’t know.
He was the largest single donor to the Amazon Labor Union. He gave money to the anti-Israel student encampments. He did at least 2 fundraisers for Gaza aid, which raised $1 million each.
He allows strangers to monetize clips of his stream on youtube and gave youtube specific instructions to allow it.
He bought his house on a 30-year mortage and it was like $2 million in West Hollywood, which is low for that location, most of the cost of his house is the location, not the size of the house.
Something you should know about celebrities and even politicians is that they often don’t buy their own clothes. Clothing companies mail free (expensive) clothing to famous people for advertising purposes. A lot of people mail Hasan a lot of free shit because they like him. He used to do a segment on stream where he would open stuff that people mailed to him.
Also he doesn’t do investing, capital gains, usury, etc. He doesn’t hire employees. He doesn’t do wage labor value extraction.
Also all his production team is a coop of which he’s part, and all his merch is made by a coop
His production is a coop right? Why would they also form a union?
Sorry, wrong word, English ain’t my first language. Thanks for the correction
Is that the merch sold on Shopify?
By voting for Kamala in a state she was never going to lose, even though the PSL candidates were on the ballot?
But seriously though, I don’t really mind the guy, but the breathless defense some people put up for him even here on hexbear does leave me a little puzzled.
He recently tried out streaming on YT when Twitch banned him for a few days and he donated all of the YT money to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). It was a total of $18,000.
The multi-million dollar home thing that his opponents like to throw around is a bit exaggerated. The man lives in LA. Homes there are astronomically more expensive than most places.
The multi-million dollar home thing that his opponents like to throw around is a bit exaggerated.
Being a leftist means you need to live on the street, but if you do, it means you’re a jealous and lazy person.
It’s a 2.71 million dollar home.
3.8k sq foot.
Five bedroom. Five and a half bath.What is being exaggerated, really? Ill be honest, I don’t really care one way or the other but its a bit much. my opinion doesn’t matter tho.
The average cost for a 4k sq ft home in LA is around that much actually. He also lives with family, he’s not taking up all that space on his own.
IDK this really sounds like the “you hate capitalism yet you own an iPhone? Curious” types.
Why are you spending all this effort defending daddy instead of just admitting he’s a Commandist who sucks off profit from the system through his celeb status, that allows him to put himself in a moral position as well as donating to moral causes, but he doesn’t actually direct anything himself and he obviously doesn’t have any chance of communicating with the masses.
Like do you even think at all? What are you doing? What’s the impact of someone donating 18.000 dollars to charity? what did it accomplish? Give me data of how adding an extra 0 to charity helps exactly and how much 0’s need to be added for communism to be implemented. If all of us give money to charity is communism finally here?
I’m fucking done with you guys. Your government is slaughtering school girls and you’re engaging in keyboard wars to defend daddy wtf is wrong with you that this is how you spend you life on. Fuck all of this. You destroyed any meaning left in the word Socialism, it mean’s fucking nothing now. Fuck you.
the big house thing is really a non sequitur. socialism isn’t a poverty cult, its about the relationship to the means of the production. Hasan may be rich but he isn’t extracting surplus labor like a bourgeois parasite. It’s the same with the lucky actors and athletes who become famous and make millions. As far as I am concerned he can do whatever he wants with his money that he earned as long as it isn’t investing in exploitation
Multimillion and its 2.7 mil? Thats a normal family home in Cali unfortunately. I know its an accurate description of the price but the home is not big and luxurious
ITT: a lot of excuses
People are being kind enough to explain things to you, try to keep up
“I dont understand the housing nightmare in california and would prefer people stay homeless or move away rather than house themselves”
Tbf it’s not just for him but also however many family members
He’s not a bad source for not-dogshit up-to-date (given a few hours’ delay for edits) news with crumbs of analysis that I broadly agree with. I don’t use Twitch or any streaming platform, I just put on clips on YT from time to time, often while working on something else. It’s tough for me to find newsy content like this that doesn’t make me cringe or piss me off one way or another. It’s turning into my equivalent of the way my folks still put the 6pm news on the radio every evening.
Do a Google search for Hasan shirtless.
If I may be Frank . AWOOOOGAAAA
Online leftists always psychotic about anyone with more than a 300 person following
Yeah it’s just envy, contra points made a great video about this
Let’s not endorse Ms “don’t post pictures of the genocide because it gives me a sad” contrapoints. She lost a lot of credibility with that move.
I’m being so sarcastic, I disagree with her and the person I’m replying to
Oh thank goodness lol
Because people don’t know Madeline Pendleton is streaming on twitch yet.
Here’s my hypothesis: he’s the Richard Spencer of the left.
The first thing he does is defy the stereotype just a little bit. Before the alt-right/anti-sjw glow up of the right, the stereotype of chuds would be frumpy suburbanites at best, but usually rednecks who don’t know a word they’re talking about (classism aside, it did make SOME chuddery ridiculous). But after that we got Richard Spencer in the suit & tie who treated being a chud as intellectual.
Now think of the current left-wing stereotype, literally either the local nerd or emo outcast from your high school. Either way, part of the “uncool” crowd. Hasan counters that by being pretty conventionally attractive and in his own words “just being a guy”. Plus he’s educated from Rutgers and speaks without Jargon so he comes off as aspirational. TL;DR: Breaks the leftist stereotype by being a bit of a jock.
The second thing he does is know when to be edgy and when not to be. He has been banned a bunch of times and has some infamy in both the traditional tv media and the social media which gives him some edgelord credentials.
I cannot watch him because he mostly eats on stream (which is fine to do, but slows down everything) and gets into fights with his chat and constantly has to repeat the same damn points. It just grates on me.
