Failed YouTuber Matt Jarbo Takes Swipe at Critical Drinker in a Desperate Bid For Relevance
Pack it in Matt, nobody cares.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel as though there’s been a trend of late for fallen online personalities of the previous decade to pop their heads up from the low station they’re currently inhabiting in the e-fame ecosystem and remind everyone how they got there. Ethan Van Sciver recently made comments about the upcoming HBO show Lanterns regarding the casting of Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, saying on a stream two weeks ago that he had concerns about Pierre being “a faggot and a homosexual” who was “creepy to hear him talk”, but remained hopeful for the show because “He looks a lot like John Stewart. I’m excited about the way he looks as John Stewart.”
This reminder of Ethan “I used to be somebody, but I’m nobody now” Van Sciver’s existence made me realize just how long it’s been since his name had made it into my X feed. I was a pretty big fan of EVS six or seven years ago, and while I won’t bore you with the reasons for my disenchantment with him as a personality or the CG movement in general, this should cover it pretty well:
MikeyNohMore, the YouTuber who made that particular video, more recently uploaded a follow up, if you’re interested:
Jeremy Hambly, aka The Quartering, was also someone I watched fairly regularly Once Upon A Time. He’s popped up in my YouTube feed for all the wrong reasons too, for reasons so voluminous it’s impossible to even begin to go into here, but the same YouTuber who made the Comicsgate doc linked above can also catch you up on him, too:
Sure enough, I didn’t have to wait long before another name I hadn’t thought of in years cropped up in my feeds; Matt Jarbo, better known from his YouTubing heyday as MundaneMatt. Jarbo got into YouTube during its early days, and would experiment with various forms of content. He’d mostly made videos giving his milquetoast trend-chasing pop culture takes until eventually striking internet gold with GamerGate. After accusing Zoë Quinn of corruption and infidelity, Quinn successfully DMCA struck Jarbo’s channel over the video for the use of a still from a game she developed. Jarbo would accuse Quinn of conducting a false flagging campaign and ride the proceeding drama to YouTube fame, eventually achieving a peak subscriber count of around 160,000 in April 2018. Why did I emphasize those words? Well . . .
On the now-infamous August 6, 2018 edition of Ethan Ralph’s Killstream, several prominent YouTubers including Keemstar and Mister Metokur among others confronted Jarbo over longstanding suspicions of false flagging channels critical of his. After denying the accusations for almost two hours, Jarbo eventually shared his screen and exposed a long history of doing exactly what he’d previously demonized Quinn of. His credibility as a free speech advocate was destroyed in the subsequent firestorm of criticism, his subscriber count plummeted and he would purge most of his videos, disable likes and dislikes and eventually rebrand the MundaneMatt channel to MattJarbo in March 2019.
I hadn’t thought about him since that fateful day on the Killstream, and after taking a look at his YouTube and X activity, it seems most of the world hadn’t, either. Since switching to livestreaming, Matt struggles to break 500 views per video despite allegedly having 107,000 followers on YouTube. His X posts fare even worse for engagement, usually achieving single-digit comments and likes despite having almost twenty thousand followers (again, allegedly). He’d also tried his hand at podcasting, apparently but . . . it seems that couldn’t find an audience, either. He ported his Hollywood After Dark podcast to yet another YouTube channel he still makes content for to this day with video views commonly hitting double digits despite an alleged 30,000 subscriber-strong audience.
Social media fame seems a crueler addiction than most, in that its exceptionally rare for those who have tasted it to ever be able to walk away from the spotlight with their dignity intact once they’re no longer able to ‘feed the beast’ and remain favored by the ever-fickle algorithm. Unable to find much success with recent streams asking if he’s too old to get into stand-up comedy (hint: that’s not the issue, Matt), or pro-AI / anti-Trump commentary, Matt saw that a lot of people seemed to be talking about the movie adaptation to Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary and decided to punch up at a much more famous internet personality:
The Drinker responded with his usual trademark wit:
If you’re wondering about the Boulder King reference, check the 10:32 mark of Metokur’s video above. And make sure you actually visit the post thread, the replies are fantastic. Matt would post a quick follow-up video on the matter, which would be laden with so much NPC speak in just three minutes you’d swear he was being run by some chatbot script (click through to video):
Shall we sample of few of the more choice replies? Let’s.
Amazing.
The sad thing is that there is infinitely more dignity and respect to be had in someone working a minimum wage job and being an actual productive member of society than there is in streaming to an audience of no one while still believing oneself relevant, but Jarbo’s pride will never allow him to realize that. Matt Jarbo hasn’t crossed Will Jordan’s or anyone else’s mind in the better part of a decade, and the only person who doesn’t seem to take the hint that it’s over is Matt Jarbo. He’ll gladly use his faded status to fight tooth and claw for scraps of attention, even if it comes in the form of being an object of ridicule for greater men. For anyone with a shred of self-respect, death would be preferable. But to the Jarbos of the world, obscurity is worse than death.
Enjoy the bump, Matt. You earned it.
Never even heard of this guy, and I've been around for a minute.
Critical Drinker is the absolute boss. Hehe. I'd rather watch his reviews than most movies.