While You Were Offline: This Is How You Come Out on YouTube



Let it be known: If you're reading these words, you might be doing the Internet wrong. That is, unless you've already finished the third season of Orange Is the New Black, which Netflix released early on Thursday just to see who was paying attention (spoiler alert: a lot of people). You have our permission to go and watch the show before you learn about everything else that's been happening on the Internet over the last week, because we all know that this is what everyone is going to be talking about for the next few days. OK, and maybe some of the stuff below, as well. Here, as ever, is the pick of the digital pops from the web for the last week.

Coming Out and Other Tales

What Happened: Ingrid Nilsen has something to tell you.
Where It Blew Up: YouTube, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: Let's start the week with something positive. If you're anything like me, you had no idea who Ingrid Nilsen was before this week (she's a YouTube beauty and lifestyle expert who's also shown up on Project Runway: Threads, apparently). But this week, she posted the above video to her YouTube channel.

Let's call it the coming out heard (and seen) around the world. Or, at least, around the Internet.

Call us saps, but this video is surprisingly touching, and we hope that it's going to prove to be inspirational to those who see it and realize that they can come out as well. For those who aren't so into the sincere feel-good nature of that last sentence, here's Nilsen's next YouTube appearance, which is definitely more traditionally entertaining, and educational. As long as you're looking to make lemon cake.

The Takeaway: Do you have hearts of stone, people? It's obvious.

I Took My Baby on a Saturday Bang*

What Happened: The head of the Spokane, Washington NAACP was revealed to possibly be a white woman who's been pretending to be black for some years.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Rachel Dolezal has the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP since the start of this year, and is also an adjunct professor of Africana Education at Eastern Washington University and the chair of the city's police oversight commission. It's likely none of those things will be the case very soon, given that this week Dolezal's racial heritage was called into question by her family. She's been claiming for a number of years that she is bi-racial, the daughter of a white mother and a black father—something that her parents, both of whom turned out to be white, disagreed with. (Her family heritage, according to mother Ruthanne, is Czech, Swedish, and German, with "faint traces" of Native American lineage.) An official inquiry has been launched in the city about the matter, because Dolezal apparently misrepresented herself on applications for the police oversight commission job, but that's almost beside the point; the Internet is on the case.

The news of course was widely reported almost everywhere possible online. (It even made Hip Hop Wired—no relation.) But it also launched an avalanche of commentary (and derision) on Twitter:

The Takeaway: At time of this writing, there's clearly a lot more to come about this story (not least of all, some explanation from Dolezal), but for now, welcome to what feels like the most white privilege story of the moment. Well done, Rachel; you've managed to wrestle the title away from a white cop who pulled a gun at a pool party. That's some doing.

(__*__People still remember "Black or White" by Michael Jackson, right?)


What Happened: The New York Post broke the surprising story that women just don't get the movie Goodfellas. Men are from Mars, women are from somewhere that doesn't really care for Martin Scorsese crime movies, apparently?

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Hey, you! Are you a woman who doesn't like the movie Goodfellas? Do you know a woman who doesn't like the movie Goodfellas? You might have wondered why that was the case, but thankfully this week New York Post writer Kyle Smith explained it all in a piece headlined "Women are not capable of understanding 'Goodfellas.'" Oh, it gets better.

Goodfellas, Smith wrote, is "a male fantasy picture—Entourage with guns instead of swimming pools, the Rat Pack minus tuxedos." And you thought it was a movie about criminals! You're probably a woman. "Women sense that they are irrelevant to this fantasy, and it bothers them," Smith explained. "To a woman, the Goodfellas are lowlifes. To guys, they're hilarious, they're heroes."

By now, you don't need us to tell you how this piece was received online, right?

Of particular notice in the deluge of people writing articles about Smith's insane, inane commentary were Lauren Duca and Erin Whitney's tongue-in-cheek attempt to understand Goodfellas ("Perhaps what Smith was trying to get at is that all the fumes from baking pies for decades has made the female brain incapable of understanding any and all art that doesn't strictly depict women, I mean 99 percent of art...") and Olivia Collette's pitying response to Smith's worldview ("It's too bad that his imagination is so limited, but it also explains why he doesn't stop to reflect on why men and women might experience a movie differently..."). Also worth noting: Goodfellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi calling Smith out on his comments. "A lot of women like the movie. The women I know, from my wife on down, got a kick out of it," he said.

While many were upset about the outrage, the Post was loving it, posting a second story about the outcry, headlined "Whoa, people are pissed at Kyle Smith over this Goodfellas thing." (Noticeably, the author was a woman.)

The Takeaway: Let Wits host and comedian John Moe have the last word on this one:


What Happened: The Federal Trade Commission decided that, just maybe, if you run a crowdfunding campaign and take people's money for a product, it's not cool to just disappear without offering anything in return.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: We've all been there: Giving money for a Kickstarter, only to receive absolutely nothing in return for complicated reasons (or, in many cases, no reasons whatsoever because the person running the campaign suddenly goes very, very quiet). No, really; almost everyone who's donated to crowdfunding campaigns knows exactly what that feels like—which is what made the news that the Federal Trade Commission is taking its first consumer protection action against a crowdsourcing campaign feel all the more satisfying.

The news that, just maybe, this could mean less crowdfunding campaigns ending in utter frustration was something that quickly spread across the Internet, perhaps because it was what people had been waiting for for some time:

Whether or not this means that people will be more responsible with their crowdfunded projects in future remains to be seen; for now, we can but hope. Some of us are still keeping a little light in our hearts for that limited edition run of Mother Box-inspired iPhone mods, dammit.

The Takeaway: The TL;DR version of the above comes via Twitter:

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

What Happened: Reddit made moves to clean up its act, banning a number of subreddit communities, and immediately came under fire for it, because of course it did.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: You know how we all know that certain elements of Reddit are terrible, horrible places that will crush your soul by exposing humanity's dark side in genuinely depressing ways, right? Well, this week, Reddit decided to close some communities on the site because they were, basically, appalling, and that turned out to be a controversial decision.

The decision to remove five "subreddits" launched a backlash against Reddit from those who saw this as unreasonable censorship—because, of course, communities called "FatPeopleHate" are entirely worthwhile things that should exist without question, obviously—and led to the creation of a Change.org petition to oust current Reddit CEO Ellen Pao because she has, and I quote, "overstepped her boundaries" with this action and is destroying the site. (Haters have taken to calling her "Chairman Pao." Get it? What were we just saying about humanity's dark side?)

The fight between Reddit supporters and those distraught at not being able to get their bile on easily is ripping Reddit apart according to some reports, although others believe that it's the best thing for the site, with some going so far as to suggest that perhaps the site should die if it can't survive this purge. (There are those hoping Reddit's revolt is success for political reasons, as might be expected).

There's already both a hashtag (#RedditRevolt) and safe haven for those free speechers who can't bear to not have a home to slur in safety; Forbes reports that Swiss-based Reddit clone Voat has become the new base camp for those looking to ensure that they can plot Pao's dismissal and Reddit's return to (not-so-)glory. Except that Voat might not be able to take the traffic of the newcomers, leading them elsewhere, potentially to 4chan spin-off 8chan. To the surprise of no one, this crap is like a Hydra. Cut off one head of unrepentant wordvomit, and two more will grow in its place.

The Takeaway: Seeing this amount of anger over a private company deciding that maybe it doesn't want to host communities entirely based on hatred is just exhausting. It's overreacting to just yell burn it all down! over and over again, isn't it? And yet...