Update: Top Youtube gaming personality Desmond Amofah (AKA Etika) found dead

[Julius Seeker]

This is some Black Mirror level shit that's happening. A guy destroyed by the social-media persona he built for himself and invested into for years.

Etika has been a popular Nintendo youtuber for almost a decade reaching nearly 1 million subscribers n his original channel. A few years ago he was probably the most popular Nintendo-based fan channel on youtube alongside GameXplain. At least among channels I frequented.

Here's a video of an incident a few months back:



Here's a video documenting his breakdown:



As a note, his decline into insanity was a longterm thing. I recall about 4-5 years ago, when he was breaking into serious money making mode - he engaged in an argument with someone who accused him of making praising videos so he could get a certain game for free; Etika responded by smashing hundreds of dollars worth of his electronics to prove that the price of a game is nothing to him. That's the first I noticed of it. He began shifting more into edgy content - he made a lot of money in livestreaming by taking donations to do reps on his weights. His content became increasingly sexualized, this was notable with his coverage of Fire Emblem games (one of his favourite franchises) where everyone just saw it as funny. It became worse, and people tuned in because most assumed it was simply a guy doing the Tom Green pretend insane for entertainment thing.

He posted a suicidal rant about 4-5 days ago:


(Note the video has been taken down)
He was talking about suicide with blank emotion at times, bursts of mild smiles and tears at other points; he lamented that he would be missing an anime film (Sword Art, I believe). He talked about the walls closing in around him, that he never thought about suicide before recently, and he said goodbye. He apologized for all of the people he had driven away, but now he was alone and the world would be better off without him; it wouldn't matter that he was gone because everyone would forget about him in time.

[Julius Seeker]

Thousands of people in the livestream covering updates.

The unidentified body was discovered at Pier 16, just downstream from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Etika's stuff was found on the Manhattan bridge.

UPDATE:
NYPD confirmed that the body was that of Desmond Amofah, AKA Etika.

[Eric]

Sad, mental health is no joke.

Even when people seek help it doesn't always have a great end result.

[kali o.]

Ya, I know a lot of people were thinking it was another cry for help / attention, but Im not surprised he actually did the deed this time, after his suicide note.

[Replay]

Fame is a real bitch. Social media is, as Penny Arcade puts it, a crucible in which modern society tempers its creators, often with hatred and cruelty.

I didn't know him or his content. He seemed like a simple and beautiful soul in some ways. Time to have better debates on what causes all of this.

[Don]

I think you get this problem because social media allows people to get fame when they don't necessarily deserve it in the classical sense. If you're a classical celebrity like say LeBron James, who has no shortage of haters on the social media, but it's not something that should bother you unless you've an especially fragile psyche. After all, you know you're literally the best at what you're doing and nobody can take it away from you. Same if you're a movie star or whatever. Those guys have a tangible talent that clearly puts them at the top and unless you already have low self-esteem issues, you're not going to worry about what a bunch of random guys on the Internet say.

But stuff like Youtubers, I always wonder how they even become famous in the first place. Usually they try to run some schtick but there's no shortage of guys trying to make funny/crazy/sarcastic/whatever you're looking for out there. Success can be quite fleeting because there's no tangible talent that is tied to such success so there's a huge amount of insecurity. I think it's not unlike how people go out their ways to make their Facebook page to project the ideal image, even though even after going through all that steps it's still not going to impress anybody because way too many people do it, but it sure adds a lot of needless pressure to try to think of something cool to update your Facebook status with. The fact is that there just aren't that many celebrities in this world and yes you might get a few more with social media but those are fought over by a huge amount of people due to an utter lack of barrier of entry so of course it's hugely stressful if you want to force yourself to come out ahead in such a race.