Picture Perfect Sadness
iDubbbz Edition
You ever see a mentally challenged kid and feel so sorry for them? Like, “that poor kid will never have a normal life” and then you watch them on the playground and they’re happy as fuck without a care in the world and you realise they’re living their best life? iDubbbz is none of the above—he went full retard, which, if popular culture is to be believed is something you never do.
Ever.
He’s currently living out a delayed childhood phase with a carer who despises him. Man, I loved old iDubbbz. It’s a sentiment many share. I’m still subscribed to two of his channels on YouTube hoping he’ll snap out of whatever the hell this all is. Hoping beyond hope he’s pulling a Nikocado Avocado—that this was all an elaborate “social experiment”, a masterful troll. I know it’s not but a girl can dream.
So what happened?
How did we get here? How did we go from a dude who was genuinely funny, played games and dunked on the quirkiest Kickstarter had to offer and the occasional Content Cop roasting, to this deluded SJW wannabe goober who couldn’t get a snicker from a room full of nitrous-huffing giggle heads?
We all might think we know what the cause was but let’s go on a fun adventure together anyway—hell, we might find some cool stuff along the way.
Random TLDR if you don’t like reading; iDubbbz went from ending careers to torching his own.
Ze Beginning (not Zee Germans…)
The year was 2010 and gamers are splatting their way through Super Meat Boy, hipsters were starting to grow out their beards and Jersey Shore was... existing. Yet from out of the rubble of popular culture emerged a YouTube gremlin by the name of iDubbbz.
Keep in mind at this time he was just another copy and paste “Let’s play” YouTuber and didn’t get much traction because of it. No, it wasn’t till around 2013 when he really started getting traction with Kickstarter Crap, where he reviewed an assortment of, well, crap listed on Kickstarter—a platform for people to, “bring a creative project to life.”
I mean look at the unfettered creativity on display here. I’m in awe of this absolute unit of a spatula. Amazing. Look at how burnt that pancake is. I have no words—he says as he continues writing unabated.
(SIDE NOTE FOR ME: iDubbbz last Kickstarter Crap video before introducing Bad Unboxing was 2014-09-20)
Monsieur iDubbbz kept the Kickstarter Crap candle burning for almost exactly one year before deciding to switch things up with his new side quest: Bad Unboxing—where he’d open stuff and waffle on a bit.
As you can see:
His views took a big hit trying something different. His fans spent the better part of a year getting to know him as the quirky Kickstarter guy—then he starts unboxing, well, boxes for the most part.
This wasn’t where his tankening began though, not by a long shot. Tankening—sounds like he was getting armoured up, stronger, which in a way he was during this period. iDubbbz trajectory was still on the upward trend overall.
To the Tippy Top
Fans of iDubbbz were falling in love (no homo) with his odd brand of humour (I’m one to talk), edging ever-so-close to taboos and boundaries and sometimes blasting through them like an Airsoftfatty lightsaber. This is what his fans came to expect, it was why they were fans and it was a breath of fresh air with the impending SJW crescendo brewing on the horizon. They saw him as respite to all the suffocating political correctness beginning to dominate online arenas—a guy throwing caution to the wind, letting loose and just having fun.
He would do things in his videos like say something “offensive” and cut it before the full word or phrase was uttered. Then there was the Tana Mongeau incident in 2017 from which her own Content Cop was born. This is the one where iDubbbz states,
either all of them are okay, or none of them are okay,
referring to slurs. Which I agree with—this idea of cherry picking which slurs are “socially acceptable” is stupid. Though ironically, 2026 iDubbbz may no longer agree with this sentiment.
Peak iDubbbz is arguably the Ricegum timeline. In October 2017 iDubbbz decided was the perfect candidate for a Content Cop, likely due to his obnoxious and arrogant demeanour—an insufferable endlessly flexing content creator. To game YouTube’s algorithm iDubbbz titled the video, “Content Cop—Jake Paul” then he tore Ricegum apart for 31 minutes. Following that he released a diss track on Ricegum, which reached number 24 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Song Sales chart. Bananas. If you search, “Asian Jake Paul” online I’m sure you’ll find it. There was a bit of back-and-forth after this but it eventually fizzled out.
This was iDubbbz peak.
2017 was the height of iDubbbz career.
He was untouchable.
It’s all downhill from here on out.
The only variable was the velocity of his fall from grace.
For iDubbbz it’d been a wild ride until this point. His cultural clout was sitting at 95/100.
I Miss the Moustacheless iDubbbz
Post-Ricegum was a content drought. There were a few things that converged and ended up pushing iDubbbz off the metaphorical cliff:
Youtube became hostile to him
No targets left for Content Cop
Ricegum episode blew out the ceiling
Sam Hyde
Anisa
Moustache
“I miss the old iDubbbz”
YouTube Hostility
YouTube has a history of modifying their policies in ways that shit on creators. It’s this persistent omniscient presence that looms over creators and has them scrambling after each change to make sure they don’t anger the YouTube gods. On December 11, 2019 YouTube announced a policy update directly on their blog that hit Content Cop-style content hard. The update contained four new specific rules that were grounds for removal:
veiled or implied threats (before they only removed explicit threats)
malicious insults based on “protected” attributes, namely race, gender expression, sexual orientation
repeated harassment across multiple videos—this is what made the Leafy Content Cop vulnerable
YouTube Partner Program suspension for repeat offenders
This policy paved the way for YouTube to remove creators and videos that were commercially or reputationally inconvenient through selective enforcement. We see this with their interpretation of “public figure”. Moving on…
No Target Left Unturned
During this period iDubbbz had exhausted suitable targets for Content Cop, i.e.:
large enough audience
publicly documented bad behaviour
hypocritical or dishonest
arrogant or take themselves too serious
buffoonish (not genuinely dangerous)
not a peer / personal friend
mockable aesthetically
audience dislikes
low likelihood of retaliation (legally, reputation, physically)
So who was left?
Logan Paul
In January 2018 this motherfucker films a dead body in Japan’s “suicide forest”, uploads it, monetises it and then in the most Logan Paulesque move ever apologises for not doing enough research. iDubbbz had the material. The target (Logan) was enormous. The audience had universally turned on him, yet iDubbbz said nothing. Not a video, not a tweet, not a disapproving glance in the general direction of Japan. This is the single most baffling omission in Content Cop history and I don’t have a satisfying answer for it.
Jake Paul
iDubbbz literally used his name as a decoy title for the RiceGum episode. He named a video after this dude, dunked on someone else entirely, and then just... left Jake alone. Standing. Breathing. Making music. The Team 10 house was a content farm of genuinely mockable catastrophe and iDubbbz walked briskly past it like someone who just shit himself.
England is my city
And I just dropped some new merch, and it’s sellin’ like a God church
Come on, man, you passed this up for a Content Cop?
Trisha Paytas
A person, who by every metric should have been a Content Cop victim at some point. Large audience, extensively documented chaos, constantly rebranding while doing the exact same things, completely self-serious about her own victimhood. She passes the checks. She remains alive and unmocked (by iDubbbz).
And then,
Onision.
Onision is complicated. The argument against him as a Content Cop target is that he’s genuinely dangerous rather than just some buffoon—and Content Cop is for comedy, not some investigative series. Onision is a buffoon. He sued the wrong Chris Hansen. He called 911 on a journalist for knocking on his door. He poured kombucha over his own head on camera in his underwear as a response to being deplatformed. The man is objectively ridiculous.
The problem isn’t that he’s not mockable. The mockery and the predation are inseparable. Content Cop was built for clowns and Onision is a clown in serious face. He’s something considerably worse, and doing a Content Cop would have been poison.
So iDubbbz wasn’t wrong when he implied there were no suitable targets. He was just wrong about why. The targets existed. What didn’t exist was a version of Content Cop that could handle them.
The Moustache
Sometimes in the story of a man’s downfall there’s a detail so specific, so quietly symbolic, that it demands its own mention.
iDubbbz grew a moustache.
History is littered with the consequences of ill-advised facial hair. Empires have crumbled. Reputations have evaporated. And somewhere in the negative space between 2017 and whatever this current era is, iDubbbz decided the look he was going for was “guy at a barbecue who’s about to give you his hot take on mortgage rates.”
This might even be the single biggest reason for iDubbbz downfall, we’ll never know for sure.
Sam Hyde and the Reversal of Fortune
iDubbbz’s entire identity was built on being the one doing the exposing. He was the guy who showed up, pulled the curtain back, pointed at what was behind it and said look at this idiot. He chose the targets, set the frame, decided when it was over.
Sam Hyde took that, flipped it and reversed it.
Before iDubbbz even arrived in Maine, Hyde and his crew had a written document detailing exactly how they were going to gaslight him. They spent $15,000 of their own money on it. They allegedly (do we really have proof?) paid a woman to play a fake girlfriend. Five days of coordinated psychological warfare on a man who thought he was making a documentary. iDubbbz left without releasing anything.
Mr Hyde waited. Watched. And when it became clear the footage was never coming, he released his own cut first—framing the entire story before iDubbbz had a chance to open his mouth. Over a million views in less than a week.
When iDubbbz finally dropped his version, the conclusion was essentially, he was using meta-irony the whole time so I never got anything genuine out of him. Which is technically a coherent enough argument and also exactly what someone says when they’ve been completely outplayed and need to save face.
We gotta really appreciate what that actually meant for a man whose entire brand was psychological dominance. He went in as the predator and came out as the docco (doggo?). The guy who made careers evaporate by pointing a camera at people had a camera pointed at him by someone who’d been preparing for months—and lost. Not even slightly. Comprehensively.
This broke something in iDubbbz. He of course didn’t make a meltdown video. No public admission, no kombucha-over-the-head moment, however often even super subtle actions speak louder than words. This all happened right before Creator Clash became his primary identity. Right before the charity disaster. Before the string of decisions that in retrospect look like a man swinging at things he can’t quite see clearly anymore (TBI?).
He went into that house as iDubbbz and came out as someone who’d been iDubbbz’d.
Anisa
Right. Here she is.
When I started writing this I was convinced Anisa was the thing, the whole thing and nothing but the thing, so help me dog. The cause. The everything. A carer who, if her documented public behaviour is anything to go by, holds her husband (Mr iDubbbz) in the same regard as a kitchen appliance—not even that most of the time. iDubbbz suddenly had some humiliation fetish.
She’s not the thing. She’s part of the overall thing—a significant one—but she’s not the thing.
When Anisa arrived on the scene, she exposed a crack in iDubbbz premise. His whole schtick ran on the guarantee that he was immune to the same social pressures he used against everyone else. He didn’t care what anyone thought. He didn’t perform for approval. He wasn’t some dancing monkey. “Built different”.
Then she done opened up an OnlyFans and the floodgates exploded verily. He went on camera and explained himself, carefully and earnestly, why he was fine with it and why you should be too.
It wasn’t just the OnlyFans. It was the explanation. iDubbbz never explained himself, his whole tower of bad unboxings was constructed on never justifying himself to anyone suddenly very much justifying himself to everyone. It was weaksauce. His audience didn’t forgive and they most definitely didn’t forget. It wasn’t necessarily because they were right, but it was the first time the curtain moved an inch, let alone parting like the red sea, and you could see him standing meekly behind it.
PewDiePie, to his credit, identified the actual mechanism at the time. He pointed out the issue wasn’t the relationship in and of itself, it was that it was iDubbbz. He was the golden boy. That was the whole kit and caboodle. They didn’t care about Anisa. They cared about what her existence implied about the man they’d constructed an identity around.
Everything iDubbbz did after this point was predicated on the notion that his audience just didn’t vibe with him anymore. Their opinion of him was doing the downward dog. Creator Clash. Sam Hyde humiliation. The charity disaster. The apology video unlisting his own best work like a man burning his CV. Each of these points were like a sledgehammer that started shifting his very foundation.
So.
I went into this article convinced it was her fault. That angle would have made for a nice clean story. She’s the perfect villain. The woman behind the curtain pulling all the strings and levers. But as with anything in life, things are messier and more convoluted than they appear on the surface.
A whole bunch of things contributed to iDubbbz ‘happening’ and I don’t even know if he had a chance of surviving it all. The odds were kinda stacked against him. YouTube pulled the ol’ bait and switch with their policies, changing the rules mid-game and enforcing them selectively (and retroactively), his format (Content Cop) hitting the ceiling, his psychological dismantling at the hands of some dude in Maine with a written playbook and no moral reservations, and yes, of course— his relationship that exposed the gap between the iDubbbz persona and the person (Ian—first time I mentioned his real name—oops made an article fopar (pronounced faux pas), introducing new information in the conclusion—lawdy lawdy I hope you can forgive me) in a way his audience (including me—self-plug) never quite recovered from.
iDubbbz went from ending careers to torching his own.
And he did it with a little help from his ‘friends’.
Anisa just had worse PR.
That’s it for now.
As always,
Good luck,
Stay safe and,
Be well.
See ya!