Early viral Web 2.0 content was amateurish and accidental rather than polished

Evidence

The first YouTube hits were quite primitive. Two Chinese art students called themselves Back Dorm Boys and lip-synched the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” inside a cramped dorm room. “Star Wars Kid” was an unintentionally comedic video of a Canadian teenager wielding a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber. These low-quality productions could hardly compete with the prestige TV of the era, like The Sopranos and The Wire. The initial wave of Web 2.0 content often felt like a digital riff on America’s Funniest Home Videos: bloopers, fails, and moments of accidental hilarity. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Marxes the amateurism of early user-generated content against the polish of prestige TV — a status/economics contrast relevant to his death-of-the-sellout mechanism. — connects to: Early Web 2.0 celebrity was built by leveraging blogs and lifestyle content — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 385; The early web’s amateur creators were a wildly heterogeneous cohort