It’s been a long week for YouTube channel H3H3, to say the least. On Monday, H3H3 host and cofounder Ethan Klein announced that the studio’s last Christmas podcasts for the year had been canceled due to a “random” strike on the YouTube channel. The strike, and subsequent rejection of Klein’s appeal, led to H3H3 being unable to upload for the week of Christmas. In some good news, just in time for Christmas, Klein’s confirmed the strike has been removed, but unfortunately unlikely to change anything.
On Tuesday, Klein announced on Twitter that YouTube had removed the strike from the H3H3 channel. Klein attributed the reversal to his “rep” and someone high up the YouTube food chain that saw the issue for what it was and was able to have a fix go through. However, Klein also confirmed that H3H3 still won’t be doing a Christmas episode, even though the team is once again able to upload new videos.
The issue is that, in between YouTube hitting H3H3 with a strike and YouTube reversing the strike, the H3H3 offices got hit with a COVID-19 outbreak. Klein says that the outbreak has effectively “contaminated our studio,” and as a result, H3H3 can’t film anything until 2022. Even with the channel banned from uploading to YouTube, it could have done a Christmas recording. That’s obviously not happening anymore.
For the time being, Klein is making up for the lack of podcasting by getting involved in drama found elsewhere on the internet. Without getting into any specifics, Klein’s been posting about Keemstar and the relative smoothness of his brain. The two are both arguing with each other about another personality, Hasan Piker, who was recently banned from Twitch for saying “cracker,” a word the platform deemed to be a slur against white people. It would make for a full podcast’s worth of material, if H3H3 was recording.
As anyone familiar with YouTube recognizes, channel strikes rarely make sense or feel legitimate. Most strikes are handed out via YouTube’s automated systems, which do little to protect content creators from spurious or even outright false strikes. Even a channel the size of H3H3 had to rely on its connections and a bit of luck to get its brief uploading ban overturned.
Yet even with YouTube’s incredibly frustrating strike system, the platform remains such a lucrative place to publish content that even the perpetually annoyed Klein took the strike in relative stride. Klein dropped the message on Twitter, updated fans that it had been reversed three days later, and has otherwise posted more about Keemstar since. That sums up H3H3 in its own unique way.
