Legendary YouTube Star TotalBuscuit Leaves Social Media with Emotional Farewell

tubefilter.com

Quitting social media is a fashionable thing to do for well known people. It can be used as a tool to revitalise their following, a means of making a statement or just a straight-up tantrum. Regardless, they're usually back on within a matter of months. Sometimes though, just from knowing what the motivation is, you know that the person in question isn't coming back, and in some cases, that's a good thing. TotalBiscuit falls well within that strata.

TotalBiscuit (real name John Bain) is a gaming commentator with a massive YouTube following. He was one of the originators of the let's play format, as in 2010, following a redundancy from his job at a finance company, he started recording himself playing the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta and talking over the top of it. By this stage he already had a good working relationship with Blizzard and his online following grew enormously.

Sadly, in 2014, he was diagnosed with a type of bowel cancer, which despite chemotherapy and a surgical procedure to remove the cancerous mass, still metastasized into his liver. At that point, he was told that the cancer was incurable, and that he had a matter of years to live. Things have started to look more optimistic since then, with the most recent tests indicating that the tumor mass had reduced significantly and hadn't spread to any of his other organs. 

That being said, Bain isn't out of the woods yet, and he is well aware of that, which is why he's quit social media. In an announcement on his Soundcloud, Bain stated that he was stepping away from all that. Principally, this means that he'll no longer be active on Twitter or Reddit, but he's also handing his Soundcloud over. From here on out, he will produce YouTube videos, and that will be all. You can listen to the full statement below, but fair warning, it's very powerful (and a tad sweary).

The reasoning behind this is simple: Bain often spent time reading feedback about his work online, both positive and negative, and he considers the continuation of such activity both detrimental to his health, and a waste of the potentially very limited time he has left on the planet. He states that, if he could, he would delete his Twitter account and have done with it, but legal obligations prevent him from doing so, so he's simply handing over the keys, and has instructed the new caretaker of the page not to let him post anything, ever.

He makes it clear that the way he is talked about on social media had previously sent him into a vicious cycle, well aware of the baseless, empty nature of the comments made against him, but unable to stop reading them. In one of his last Twitter posts, he lambasted a fraction of the Reddit community, characterising them as "an unelected commission of arbiters that sits there in loud judgement everytime I say something."

You wanna know the reason I hate some people on the subreddit? Because the subreddit spends more time (cont) https://t.co/HyQBmi94PM

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) January 24, 2016

If you ask me, it's a bold, admirable move, made by someone in a situation you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Bain is married and has a young son, those are the people he is giving priority to, and seeing his perspective on the world of social media henpecking, with that in mind, makes it abundantly clear how pointless and sinister it all is. I wish John the very best, and hope that he pulls through.

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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