Hi. I'm the backtuber.com guy.

The past two and a half months have been some of the most fun time I've ever
had, developing software that I could pretend someone is having fun with. As a
hobbyist game developer, using problem solving to bring people fun is
practically my dream. Recently, people have voiced a serious desire for the joke
to end, and I'll gladly give in (although for now that simply means no longer
updating the website). I figured I'd add something here for anyone who might
still check this site somehow, to share the entirety of my candid thoughts for
some sort of closure while this all ends.

Let me tell you a brief history of the website. After the initial Vedal raid
into Crelly, as part of her assimilation into the vedalverse umbrella community,
she was educated on many popular clips. She gave her reaction to a certain clip
and the community immediately labeled her a backtuber. Inspired by her having
recently receiver her own redirect from "desperatevtuber.com", I wanted to do
something similar to bully her. So I decided I'd create a website that randomly
redirects to different backtubers, so as to lower Crelly to their level. I
posted it in her Discord for chat to bully her with, and later into her memes
channel where she found it. We all had a laugh, and that was supposed to be it.
It was never meant to leave Crelly's community, much less live for longer than a
single stream.

Then Aquwa started streaming. Then Milk. Hana and Mega. Without fail, in each
chat, various chatters declared that "backtuber.com" brought them there.
Reactions were shared. After seeing the reception, I wanted to polish the site,
so I added some features, like the occasional messages and the offline page. It
was very fun seeing chat reactions to everything going on. Somehow it got voted
by chat as the QR code on screen for the remainder of Mega's birthday subathon.
The last big thing I added was an ARG I made in a week as a kind of solo jam,
which was incredibly fun to do, even if I don't believe there's enough activity
to ever solve it.

On many occasions, the community called for someone to be deemed a backtuber
even after some very mild reaction. I ultimately dismissed pretty much all of
them. Eventually Cotton collabed with Vedal and the community consensus was
simply too strong. At that point, I had no longer seriously considered that a
possibility since the meme had come to refer to the five specific backtubers
more than any clip reaction. I figured there was no stopping the community,
though, so I caved and she's here to stay as well now. I have a suspicion that
this will remain the final addition.

I have no clue how little or how much this project has contributed to the meme.
Perhaps it isn't too late to ask for feedback? I can only hope that none of the
attention that it *did* bring contributed to anyone's discomfort, but if it did,
I want to express my deepest apologies. The entire time, I've tried my best to
respect every party involved when it comes to the website. I have tried to avoid
engaging with actual shipping, and I've always tried to treat (and bully) each
backtuber equally without playing favorites. Those have always been the core
principles I've considered when making any changes to the site. If I've failed
at any of them, I am genuinely sorry.

Originally I thought the site was so stupid that it didn't make sense to take
credit for it -- I expressed this to some knowers asking if I wanted them to
mention me as the one to blame very early on. After it was spread by the
community and clippers, I started feeling like maybe I should've taken credit.
Maybe it could've led to some sort of behind-the-scenes
collaboration/freelancing, who knows (although it's kind of delusional to
consider that a reasonable outcome). Too late now for what-ifs. But it felt too
awkward to do it after the fact.

Later I wanted to start giving subtle hints to the streamers to see if they
realize. The one I gave to Milk and Crelly went over their heads in such a
frustrating way that I had to out myself to Milk lol. Somewhat recently I had an
idea to bully Crelly by outing myself to everyone else in hopes to point and
laugh at Crelly later. That plan got shut down fast as I got reality-checked by
the fact that most people really don't give a shit about the site lol. I already
feel guilty enough for using this site for all of this selfish fun, so I won't
be mentioning it anywhere anymore, nor forcibly taking credit for it.

I am extremely happy with every second I spent delivering high-quality,
overengineered software for this project. I will be looking to do something nice
with this site. The domain is going to remain registered halfway through next
year and the server is being run off of spare capacity on my VPS, so it only
makes sense to use it to celebrate the positive things that the collective
community did.

"I tell you what, this has been really fun. And I got to help make something
pretty cool, so I've got no complaints. It's the kind of thing that makes you
glad you stopped and smelled the pine trees along the way, you know?"




Thanks for the IP addresses xdx*
- Vedal987, surely

It's not hard to find me/ask around if you really need to.






* For transparency's sake since I've joked about this way too much, I have never
stored any sensitive information about visitors. Cloudflare shows aggregated
stats about countries and what not, and the default Nginx logs store only the
Cloudflare proxy node's address and not the visitor's original IP address.