Welcome back once again to another episode of Whatever Happened To; where we talk about YouTuber's that were very promising but soon fell apart for being terrible. 4 days ago, I talked about a short-lived Minecraft YouTuber known as SokarEntertainment leaving near the end of 2012 (November to be exact) but still had an online presence on social media and came back to explain his absence. Funny how I brought up the year 2012 because we have a trend which started around this timeframe and possibly earlier. I'm talking of course TheReplyGirl which was considered the most hated trend during the Golden Age of YouTube, thus YouTube deleting her account. The question is, Whatever Happened to her?
I'm going to explain on what the trend was in simpler terms and please take this with a grain of salt. Back in 2012, YouTube did this thing to what I call the "Response Program." It was essentially a way for creators to do video responses to videos they either liked or disliked. So, a primary example of a video title would be "Re: A cozy game about making friends & making drinks" and something along the lines of that, I'm giving an example. They would start with the short word Re: (meaning respond or response) and take the title of another person's video they liked/disliked. Hopefully I explained it in simpler terms.
Why The Trend Was Hated:
Output of Spam / Severe Backlash & Parodies:
You can probably tell by now where this is going. The "response program" in 2012 was so out of control that by the end of the year, YouTube had cancelled the program. This was mostly due to a high velocity of spam and hate towards YouTube in general. The two people that were actually part of this was 'TheReplyGirl' and 'MeganSpeaks.' This was actually a huge problem with the gaming section on YouTube because users would be flooded with either MeganSpeaks or TheReplyGirl videos in the sidebar. This was of course within the violation of the Terms of Service. People within the gaming community hated this because not only it was useless content but the fact that they're doing this in push-up bras and low-cut tops makes them feed for attention. So, some of them started the "Anti-ReplyGirl Campaign" to where they can put an end to the Reply Girls trend.
This campaign really didn't go anywhere (not as much to some degree) but it did form a lot of parodies from users including Zach Hadel of Psychicpebbles. Not only gamers hated this idea, but most of the reply girls would threaten the creators basically doing it for the money. One of the reply girls named Alejandra Gaitan was the first person to receive the backlash first followed by extreme death threats because of the concept she created back in 2011. A change.org petition was created for the sole purpose reaching out to YouTube to try and put an end to this, reaching over 4,250 supporters.
In May of 2012, VICE made a video where it briefly talks about the reply girl. It's not just the girls, in fact a guys did this trend to with LifeInATent being one of them. By the time that mid to the end of 2012 rolled around YouTube finally stepped in, ended the "Response Program", and terminated all of the reply girls from their platform due to spam. Honestly, YouTube should've never done this in the first place because before that, they had a rule under their ToS about spam content and the reply girls is a primary example of that. It was so out of control that it made YouTube change the rules on the platform forever. Even though this is just the saga, the real question is whatever happened to them after the termination? Well, no one knows in particular. Because this is over 10 years old now, I would assume their living a normal life and trying to stay out of things. That's one theory.
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