Ollie was asleep at three in the morning when the Discord app on his phone started blowing up. He panicked; many of his friends lived in different time zones, but they knew how late it was for him. The only reason they’d be frantically messaging him in the middle of the night is if something terrible happened. Bolting awake, he checked his messages. 

“OLLIE, DREAM JUST GAVE YOU A SHOUTOUT ON TWITTER!” 

“DREAM SHOUTED YOU OUT!” 

A high school student and artist, Ollie spends much of his free time making fan art about his favorite Minecraft streamers. Dream, arguably the main character in his Minecraft universe, known as Dream SMP, has more than 2.7 million followers on Twitter and nearly 20 million subscribers on YouTube. So when Ollie saw Dream tell his followers to check out the art on his account, Ollie burst into tears. His own Twitter account went from around 8,000 followers to more than 13,000 followers in one night. 

“In that moment, I felt so valued in the community,” Ollie told The Verge over Discord. “Not because of the numbers that were coming through with the shoutout, but because of how many people I realized were around me, supporting me, and being such amazing friends.”

Describing the story of Dream SMP to anyone not paying attention to every stream or YouTube upload can sound like a made-up language. Dream SMP (SMP stands for “survival multiplayer,” a type of Minecraft server) was created by a YouTuber who goes by Dream. Over the last 18 months, Dream has invited other Twitch streamers and YouTube personalities — including TommyInnit, Tubbo, GeorgeNotFound, Punz, and several more — to join in. Together, they get into hijinxes, stage lengthy feuds, and pal around for a combined audience of tens of millions of people. Dream went from 1 million to 15 million subscribers in one year alone. Some of it is scripted and planned out, driving a larger story, but many of the reactions and circumstances are totally improvised. 

Like a television show or cinematic universe, Dream SMP found its audience through a series of never-ending epic battles. The “Disc Saga” played out over countless hours, turning a game of capture the flag (essentially) into a dramatic tale of good versus evil, as Dream and TommyInnit fought for dominance of the server. Once Wilbur Soot, a 24-year-old YouTuber from Britain and one of the main Dream SMP writers, joined in, he set up L’Manberg and created a space for a specific batch of creators. This eventually led to an all-out battle for independence with Dream that enraptured YouTube’s Minecraft audience. On the Dream SMP, there’s always something big brewing, but it’s also the tiny, funny, and sweet moments that transform each streamer into a character worth rooting for — not unlike comic book heroes and villains.

The only thing more impressive than the elaborate world they’ve created is the fan base that’s sprung up around it. Dream SMP fanfiction writers dominate websites like Archive of Our Own, Dream SMP fan art can be found all over Tumblr and Twitter, and Dream SMP fan songs (including an entire in-the-works musical) get uploaded to YouTube. There is also a plethora of clip accounts that track Dream SMP stories for people who can’t tune in to each stream, full-blown fan-made animated episodes paying tribute to Dream SMP’s ongoing stories that air weekly on YouTube, and even a 24/7 news network devoted to tracking the universe’s story and hijinks. Dream SMP may exist on a tiny Minecraft server, but thanks to a fan network stretching across the globe, it’s become a worldwide phenomenon. 

Being a member of the Dream SMP community can sometimes feel like a full-time job. For Evan, it’s practically become one. At 16, he juggles attending school and working on documentary-style videos for his channel, he told The Verge. Each video is designed to provide an entertaining and accurate summary of the various lore that comes out of Dream SMP storylines, and a growing audience tunes in. Evan has nearly 400,000 subscribers, and his Dream SMP videos collect millions of views. Those videos can take Evan more than a month to complete; his last video took more than 120 hours alone.

“I’m trying to balance videos and homework right now, but it’s weird because I find myself having to work on homework even when the videos make me significantly more money,” Evan told The Verge on a phone call one night. “Obviously, I’m not making anything from school — I wish we got paid to go to school — but it’s like homework is essentially keeping me from working.”

Since the Dream SMP lore is constantly growing, a big part of Evan’s job is trying to piece it all together for newcomers who find his videos, hoping to catch up. In one video, Evan tries to keep track of each time Tommy and Dream stole discs (think CD-ROMs with music on them) from each other and hid said discs far within the block earth that makes up a Minecraft server. Evan makes it easy to follow, hitting just the right dramatic notes as the story progresses, but he says the work can be exhausting. 

As Evan describes it, trying to summarize Dream SMP plots in the simplest way possible is like “trying to explain a movie to someone who’s never seen a movie before.” Evan has also run into newfound challenges that make the job harder. When the Dream SMP creators started streaming more on Twitch, it became more difficult to track down videos to watch after the fact. He, too, has to rely on WikiGuides from devoted fans and popular clips on Reddit to figure out what video he should focus on next.

“The toughest parts to understand are what’s happening now,” Evan said. “Now, there will be points where there will be multiple streams happening at the exact same time, and both of them have really important stuff being added to the main story.” 

With the Dream SMP creators posting fewer YouTube videos and documentarians like Evan taking additional time to get the videos just right, a need has developed for daily updates.

Sam, Claire, Kenzie, Mae, Alex, Lilja, and Boston make up a group of mostly teens who run DreamSMP Updates, a Twitter account dedicated to updating fans on “who’s live, who’s on each other’s streams, when the members release something, an explanation on the storyline for when people miss live streams,” and more. Basically, it’s a one-stop shop for anyone looking to find up-to-the-minute information about their favorite streamers or check in on the big things that happened on stream if they weren’t able to watch. Sam started it in December, asking friends she met through the community to help out with the project. 

The group told The Verge over a Discord chat that it takes some coordination, but they’ve gotten to the point over the last several months where everyone knows what their role is within the team. It’s a huge responsibility, one that every member takes on without asking for any kind of payment in return. People expect everything to be right 100 percent of the time, Claire said, adding, “We have a lot of responsibility to be the person that people need.” 

Work is divided into sections (often grouped by platforms), and those can change day to day, Alex said. Someone handles keeping up with YouTube uploads, merchandise updates from each creator, ensuring the Twitch bot doesn’t flail when streamers go live, keeping fans updated with creator appearances in separate streamers, etc. Claire and Boston mostly handle tweeting explanations of what happened on the stream and how it pertains to ongoing lore. (“Puffy says she does believe Dream is wrong, that its good he’s in Prison, that he deserves the punishment,” one recent update reads.) Boston keeps an eye on what’s happening, tweeting updates when needed, while also jotting down live notes about every new lore development. It’s a complicated operation — one the team does because of their love for Dream SMP creators and the community in which they found one another as friends.

“One of my favorite things to do on the account is look at DMs and talk to people in DMs,” Kenzie said. “When I see people thanking us for the account, it makes me feel good that I’m helping people out and doing something for the community. That’s probably what motivates me to continue running the account.”

Even after the 30 or so Dream SMP members have signed off, fans keep expanding its world. Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest fanfiction sites, is home to nearly 106,000 works listed under Video Blogging RPF (fanfiction about real streamers and vloggers). The biggest fandom under that umbrella is Minecraft. Wattpad has just under 34,000 works listed under “Dream SMP,” and Tumblr is full of many more. 

At one point, fans of the saga “Heat Waves,” one of the most viral Dream SMP fan stories, thought they crashed Archive of Our Own when rushing to read a new chapter. The site’s downtime was just a coincidence, but “Heat Waves” at the time was the “third most kudosed fic on the site,” an administrator told The Verge’s Adi Robertson. (Kudos are equivalent to a like on Facebook.) The story became so popular that the Glass Animals song “Heat Waves,” which inspired the name of the story, crept into the Hottest 100 tracks in Australia last year, partially thanks to the fanfiction.

What’s helped to propel that community is the way Dream SMP has incorporated it into the stories that actually play out on their server. During one arc, fans started using the phrase “welcome home, Theseus” in their art, essays, and songs, comparing Tommy to the Greek hero who was exiled. Eventually, the Dream SMP streamer Technoblade actually used the line. “I screamed so loudly I probably did permanent damage to the hearing of the brother sitting next to me,” as one fan, who goes by Teahound, wrote on Tumblr.

“I decided to write about how the Dream SMP is a brilliant example of how to do fan service properly,” Teahound continued. “But actually, what is happening on the SMP cannot be described as fanservice. It’s collaborative storytelling in it’s best form.”

The community wouldn’t continue to thrive if there wasn’t a plethora of fans celebrating and boosting people’s work. “Usually, big fandoms are kind of toxic in some aspects. But this community genuinely respects the content creators, and we all genuinely support each other,” Ali Tyler, a college student who has helped create an entire musical based on the Dream SMP, said in a phone interview with The Verge.

Fan creations are mostly positive, but there are more controversial sectors where critics argue a line is crossed. Because the streamers are real people, the stories have faced criticism for sexual depictions of everyday people. “Heat Waves” focuses on Dream and GeorgeNotFound, two prominent members of the Dream SMP world, as they dance around their feelings for each other. In real life, they’re just good friends. But in fanfiction, they often become much more.

The majority of writers contributing to the Dream SMP fanfiction community “hate to see real people’s boundaries being crossed as well,” says Xetera, who writes real-person fiction within the Dream SMP universe. Newer writers “tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” and that’s something the community tries to push back against. 

“I believe people fight over boundaries more than trying to listen when creators speak,” Xetera said over Discord, noting that “when people do listen and are respectful, the community is at its best.”

At the center of all of these stories — the artists, writers, YouTube editors, and musical producers — is the community. Beyond the creators they watch, it’s the friends they make, feeling like they’re a part of this rapidly expanding and immersive moment in internet culture. It’s a world all their own, and they want to contribute their little section to the overarching narrative in any way that they can. For Ollie, the first artist that Dream ever gave a shoutout to on Twitter from his dedicated Dream fan art account and who wants to pay it forward by giving new artists their chance in the spotlight, that’s everything.

“If it weren’t for the community that we’ve built, the Dream SMP wouldn’t have the same charm that it does,” Ollie said. “And I think the creators know that, too.”

Matthew “MatPat” Patrick was on YouTube for two years before he hit publish on the first entry in the series that changed his life — and YouTube culture as a whole. 

“Game Theory,” a series that examines the ins and outs of popular video game franchises like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Minecraft, premiered on April 18th, 2011. The channel quickly found an audience of gaming enthusiasts and industry developers who wanted to learn the secrets behind why certain games became such a hit. YouTubers also looked to him as a model, as Patrick successfully helped to pilot an entire genre of videos, using tricks he had learned while working behind the scenes at a multichannel network (an older YouTube model that has slowly faded away).

Throughout the years, MatPat’s channel became a go-to open secret for new YouTube creators and game developers. He was one of the first creators to explain why Minecraft was so successful on YouTube, for example. By 2017, he became a leading figure within the community, fighting on behalf of YouTubers during the “adpocalypse.” He even went on to host an interview session with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki about creator issues.  

In 2014, Patrick expanded “Game Theory” into a franchise with “Film Theory,” and “Food Theory” followed just last year. His videos routinely pick up millions of views, and he employs a full team to help with editing and creating new episodes. Alongside his wife and channel partner Stephanie, the two are also exploring more charity live streams for causes close to their hearts. In December 2020, one of their charity streams raised more than $3 million for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. 

With the 10th anniversary of Game Theory approaching, Patrick sat down with The Verge for an interview about what’s changed on YouTube over the last decade and what’s next. 

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The first question, which is maybe a big one, but in these last 10 years, what’s the biggest thing that has changed? 

Oh, well! [Laughs] It’s pretty massive. 

I think the biggest stuff is the idea of being a YouTuber, and being a creator, has fundamentally shaped so much of entertainment, of being a storyteller — of the world ecosystem, in a lot of cases. The idea that anyone with a phone in their hand can not just create something but find an audience somewhere in the millions or tens of millions, and ultimately build a business off of it. 

That democratization of entertainment is huge because now you’re giving voice to people who never would have had a platform. You’re giving rise to stories like the Dream SMP, which no television producer in their right mind would ever think to greenlight or understand why it could be so popular — and yet, it’s the biggest thing happening on YouTube right now. That sort of fostering of creativity, that explosion of being able to tell your own story is really exciting. 

You see those ripple effects happening, too. In the way that the lead shows, especially during COVID, had to film at home and become vloggers in their own right. Gaming has permeated the sports world in a way that 10 years ago would have never existed. Even the evolution of live content, as celebrities kind of tried to try to find their own audiences outside of their individual projects… they’re following the models that YouTubers and digital creators have been pioneering over the last decade. 

You inspired a lot of people to kind of figure out a way to do those types of videos [theories and in-depth explainers] that are really influential and informative. When did you start noticing, like, “Ah, this thing I created is taking off to the point that people want to replicate it?” Imitation is the biggest form of flattery. 

We were one of the early video essay formats. From the YouTube creator standpoint, I think it was probably about three years into us doing the show that I first started to really take note that other people were attempting the format. I think it was VSauce3, the pop culture science channel, which was massive at the time. I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s my format. And they’re doing it.” 

That was also the first time that I got really scared. We were still in relatively early days, still finding our audience, and here’s this massive channel that is doing roughly the thing that we’ve been doing for the past three years — hopefully they don’t run us out or whatever. But what we came to learn very quickly was there’s an audience that is big enough for everyone, and everyone kind of tackles that theorizing format in their own unique voice, which is really exciting. You now have a community of theorists all applying their logic in different ways and can create complimentary content, as opposed to content that cannibalizes each other.

In a different version of 2021, if Game Theory didn’t exist, if someone were to come to you and say, “I have this idea for this channel I want to do,” would that be able to find an audience today? Is there room for Game Theory today or is that something that had to happen at the moment it did?

It sounds a little bit defeatist, but I think it had to kind of happen when it did. 

The nature of theorizing does not work well with the modern ecosystem of digital video. Having thoughtful analytical pieces that take a week to put together like our videos doesn’t run with the speed that the internet runs with at this point. Doing this sort of research piece, it’s just hard to do. And you see that too even with educational channels in the space, right? The channels that have been able to survive in 2020 / 2021 are the established ones: the VSauces of the world, the Physics Girls of the world. These channels that can afford to have a little bit of a delay between their uploads because their audience is already there. That affords them the time to do the research, to do the scripting, to make sure that their facts are correct. 

If you’re looking to kind of get some sort of accelerated growth on the platform, that requires a faster cadence of uploads or being able to more closely ride trends. A single creator, doing all the steps on their own, would really struggle to do all of it in the time it takes to be competitive in that landscape.

What’s the future of gaming videos? Is it more Dream SMP stuff? Or is there a place where people can still do let’s plays and all that with games when YouTube is trying to figure out how to keep advertising going and keep the children’s privacy law COPPA in mind? 

Gaming is stronger than it’s ever been. In 2020, gaming was one of the few fields that didn’t just sustain itself but thrived as more people found gaming to fill in the gaps that the disappearance of reality kind of left in its wake. A lot of people had these gaps in their schedules, gaps in social calendars, and gaming was able to kind of fill those holes. People were having graduations in Minecraft, people were going to the museum in Animal Crossing. Gaming kind of exploded in the last year. 

I think Dream SMP is definitely one route. It’s not just gaming, it’s narrative storytelling through the lens of gaming. You’re starting to see more people kind of adopt that Machinima idea of, “Hey, here’s a world in which I can treat this not as a game, but as a platform.” Fortnite is doing it a lot of ways to where they have the creative block where you can create whatever you want. That’s really cool. Game developers are recognizing that the game doesn’t end when a player beats it or when the match ends, but it can become an ecosystem, a platform of its own to foster the creativity of its players. 

Minecraft has always had that. That’s one of the reasons why Minecraft has had such staying power. You’re seeing other gaming companies recognizing this and trying to build in that direction. I can see that being the direction of where gaming content moves from here. It’s less about sitting down on the couch and playing through this narrative story time together, and more sitting down on the couch and creating a world together using the tools of Fortnite or Minecraft. 

Do you feel like the term “YouTuber” now comes with more authority and more respect than it did in 2011? From your perspective, as someone who is an entrepreneur as well as a creator, how have those conversations changed with industry people that you meet when you say, “I’m on YouTube, I’m a YouTuber?”

I think, for a long time, there was this kind of an attempt to educate traditional media about that exact issue. That being a YouTuber wasn’t a dirty word, right? There is a specific connotation attached to that, like a certain tier of creator — an upper tier of creator who is delivering this interesting content. But I think a lot of times, myself included, we got frustrated that a lot of times those conversations tended to fall on deaf ears. The learning process was slower than we hoped. 

Nowadays, in 2021, it’s one of those things where there’s a division of people who get it and people who don’t. Rather than trying to prove credibility to the people who don’t, the industry is just moving forward. You either get it or you don’t. This is where there is still a division in the ecosystem, people who still don’t respect it or who still kind of look down on the title of YouTuber. But the need to kind of prove that legitimacy has kind of faded away. There’s enough critical movement in the ecosystem, in the traditional space, in the brand space, that it’s like I will find the people who understand me and respect me and move forward with them. If you don’t hop on the train, well, you’re just gonna get left behind.

I often think about not just how much has changed since 2011, but things that I miss from that era. There was a moment of true experimentation for an online video platform. I miss that. There are other things that I don’t miss. It was chaotic, and not always in a good way. Is there anything that you miss about that specific era? And is there anything from that specific era of YouTube that has kind of gone away that you’re happy about?

In the early days of digital video, and in the early days of Game Theory, it was the Wild West. You were able to kind of produce videos on any game, any topic, and there wasn’t a pressure for that upload to perform or there wasn’t an expectation of earning money off of it. You did get a lot of really interesting, really off-the-wall experimental videos that were true expressions of a person’s creativity and you saw stuff unlike anything you would see elsewhere online.

The window of what is acceptable to put on YouTube has really narrowed. You have regulations on one side dictating what isn’t kids’ content, you have rampant demonetization dictating what can or can’t be said or shown in a particular video. There is a certain level of polish that modern YouTube kind of expects of videos for them to kind of get a decent amount of traction on the platform. You lose a lot of the rawness — the bad cameras, the wonky editing, the YouTube slideshows of yesteryear — because the platform does have a standard of quality now that it’s looking to show to audiences around the world. And I understand why. 

But something does get lost for small creators who are still using this as a platform to kind of find their voice, find their audience. I definitely miss that. I miss that idea of community, that idea of anything goes, that idea of chaos. It’s a double-edged sword. As we talked about before, what it means to be a YouTuber is less stigmatized, there is a group of people who understand it. So the ability to build a business on YouTube on one hand is kind of a bummer because it’s no longer one person in the Wild West. 

Now at the very least, I have stability. We’re going on 10 years, and I think for the first five of them, we operated under the motto that this bubble could burst at that moment. The algorithm could shift, advertisers could leave, YouTube could get shut down. Now, YouTube, the ecosystem, how it’s perceived in the world has evolved in such a way that this is a more stable place to build a business. Advertisers come and go, and you will have your occasional adpocalypse, but the system has matured in such a way that paranoia of always having to look over your shoulder has started to ebb away a little bit, and you’re able to focus on running your own race and making the stuff that you are able to produce as best as possible. 

What is something that you’ve seen go around, assumptions that people make, that people actually get wrong?

There’s a stigma that comes with anyone who’s kind of built out their team and has been public about it. The idea of, “Oh, this isn’t your channel anymore because you have an editor and a researcher, or you have someone who helps you upload the videos.” 

What’s exciting to me is that it allows us to do what we love to do at a larger scale and actually stay relevant in 2021 with the kind of faster pace that YouTube expects at this point. Not only that, but also employ like-minded individuals who also are creative and have something that they want to say, or who are theorists like me, who have their own properties that they want to talk about. What a lot of people see is, “Oh, you became corporate” or we became a business. Yeah, we became a business, but that doesn’t lose the core of the creativity that brought us here in the first place. In fact, it’s enabled us to empower other creatives like ourselves to find employment doing the stuff that they love.

Finally, last question, and it might be a little tougher. What’s next for you? Is there a future beyond YouTube?

We just launched Food Theory, and that’s been a lot of fun. That’s been really creatively refreshing for us. You can theorize about things that don’t just exist in the pop culture lexicon, you can theorize about anything in your day-to-day life. We have some thoughts as to what else you can theorize about, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that one fill in at some point. 

Our main focus now is doing exactly what we talked about: being an influencer of influencers where we are trying to advocate to YouTube on behalf of creators’ rights and needs. We’re trying to find solutions for channels that are having trouble with monetization, having trouble with COPPA or things like that to try and help them be able to find the stability that we’ve been able to find. Finding business solutions and creator solutions that work for this kind of next generation of creators. We’ve been really working behind the scenes to make those tools available to creators so that way they can grow their own businesses faster and not have to make mistakes that we made along the way. 

The last thing is our charitable work. At the end of last year, we had the amazing ability to raise $3 million for St. Jude along with the help of 50 of our favorite creators across various platforms. We see the importance of using the platform that we’ve been given, that we’re lucky enough to have built over the years, for good. If we can kind of pay it forward and pass along that goodwill and serve as an ambassador for worthwhile causes in order to inspire the next generation of creators to make good use of the fortunate position they’ve been given, that’s great as well.

One perk of being an AT&T wireless subscriber was being able to stream HBO Max without that counting toward a customer’s data cap. That’s no longer the case.

California’s new net neutrality law includes banning sponsored data services, known as zero-rating, which previously allowed companies like AT&T to cover data usage of certain platforms (like HBO Max) for customers who use other offerings like internet plans. As part of the law, internet service providers like AT&T won’t be able to cover bundle customers’ streaming data usage alongside no longer being able to offer paid prioritization or play down service speed questions.

“We regret the inconvenience to customers caused by California’s new ‘net neutrality’ law,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California.”

While some representatives (and The Verge) see this as an absolute win, the telecom giants like AT&T feel differently. The companies tried to invoke a preliminary injunction in late February that would stop the bill from passing, but Judge John Mendez declined the request. AT&T called a state-by-state approach to net neutrality “unworkable” in the blog post today.

“We deliver the content and services our customers want because it’s what they demand, not because it’s mandated by regulation,” the blog post reads.

For AT&T specifically, promising that HBO Max subscribers who are also AT&T wireless customers could stream without worrying about hitting their data caps is a big deal. AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018 for $85 billion. The goal was always to launch what HBO Max became and integrate that vertically with its other businesses. AT&T wireless customers could sign up for HBO Max and stream without worrying about data caps, which might be a selling point for some customers who are looking to switch internet service providers and want to stream all the Friends in the world.

As AT&T tries to scale HBO Max’s subscriber base, the company is looking into any opportunity to get more people to stream and for longer periods of time. With a cheaper, ad-supported tier coming in June, any little extra “offer” can help the company sign up customers and potentially convince people to spend more time watching HBO Max instead of Netflix. Not enabling this type of corporate influence, however, is something that Barbara van Schewick, a law professor at Stanford University and the director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, celebrated in a blog post today.

“People should be free to choose which videos they want to watch — whether that’s Netflix, Twitch or their local church’s Sunday service, without the company they pay to get online trying to influence their choices,” van Schewick wrote, adding that AT&T is “trying to score political points against state net neutrality protections by lying to the public about the law and its effects.”

For AT&T customers, this means that streaming HBO Max will start counting toward your data cap. But it also means that it’s slightly more difficult for AT&T to influence customers into using more of their products.

On March 18th, a four-hour version of director Zack Snyder’s original vision for Justice League will hit HBO Max.

Early reviews are mostly littered with praise for the movie, calling it a win for fans of Snyder’s other superhero films (Batman v Superman, Man of Steel). Others acknowledge that, hey, at least it’s better than the original film released in 2017, which was spliced together by Joss Whedon after Snyder had to step back from the project to cope with the sudden death of his daughter. Whether the movie lives up to people’s expectations or not, the very existence of it — the marketing behind it, what it represents to fandom as a whole — is a turning point for online fandom. 

A quick reminder of what the last four years have consisted of from various corners of the internet: after Justice League came out in 2017, Snyder fans immediately took up a petition asking Warner Bros. to release an alternate of the film — the true version they called the Snyder Cut. Over the years, calls for Warner Bros. to take action have grown, as has the fandom. Billboard signs in Times Square, bus ads in San Diego during Comic-Con, and small demonstrations outside Warner Bros.’ headquarters in Burbank all existed in an attempt to rally WarnerMedia executives into giving them the version of Justice League they were promised through setups in Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, and more. 

Like any massive faceless group centering their online personas on one particular thing or person, the Snyder Cut fandom (or the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut collective, as they became known) was a mixture of positives and negatives. The positive aspects are inspiring. Together, the group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for suicide prevention awareness, a cause close to Snyder’s heart after his daughter’s death. A fandom rooted in a specific director spawned some genuinely thoughtful social media campaigns. There’s no denying that.

It’s also impossible to ignore the negatives. Critics and reporters received countless death threats and vile slurs all because they expressed disinterest in a Snyder Cut or called Snyder’s other work bad. Warner Bros. and DC Comics executives like Geoff Johns and former Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara were lambasted by Snyder fans to the point that Johns seemingly stopped using Twitter altogether. When new Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff joined the company, her Twitter mentions were full of people demanding the Snyder Cut.

“It took them a long time, the people who really wanted to be productive in this moment, to realize that they’re going to get judged by [negative] actions also,” Sean O’Connell, a journalist and author of Release the Snyder Cut, a book detailing the campaign over the last four years, tells The Verge. “The Snyder movement doesn’t have a really strong hold on policing the people in their movement who continue promoting that negativity.” 

Even with critics, academics, and journalists calling out the toxic parts of the fandom, there were some members within the group who only seemed incentivized by ongoing acknowledgment and less-than-subtle encouragement from Snyder himself. The director recently told The New York Times that “it’s in some ways fun to surf the wave of a cultural phenomenon,” adding that “in other ways it’s terrifying and horrible.”

Snyder Cut fans are far from the only fan base with a toxic cloud hanging over parts of it. Star Wars is a perfect example. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, alongside actors John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, received hordes of harassment from bitter Star Wars viewers. Boyega and Johnson publicly fought back against trolls, while Tran decided after some time to leave social media platforms like Instagram for her own mental health. At the time, Lucasfilm executives didn’t say anything publicly, nor did any of the official Star Wars social media accounts. 

One of the biggest changes that has come about in an internet-first, social media-dominant world is that fans of massive properties feel closer to talent, executives, and companies than ever before. In turn, companies are trying to figure out how to navigate extremely loud voices on increasingly global platforms. Universal leaned into the #JusticeForHan hashtag when marketing its upcoming F9, a popular fan-driven movement. Sony reworked the overall tone for Venom after the first trailer failed to garner hype from Marvel fans. And perhaps most notably, Paramount completely redesigned its CGI version of Sonic the Hedgehog after the first trailer led to immediate negative reaction from fans.

Parts of the Snyder Cut fandom have drawn direct comparisons to what happened with BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After the game’s ending drew heavy criticism from fans, BioWare released an alternate ending to try to smooth over a vocal part of the fan base. The DLC was called Mass Effect: Extended Cut, and it became an example of corporations giving in to social media pressures.  

“It’s such a slippery slope,” O’Connell says. “I don’t think that studios and corporations are going to make decisions going forward to placate fans on social media because that’s a risky gamble. At the same time, this entire DCEU experiment, to me, has been reactionary to the studio’s detriment. They started chasing the Marvel model instead of just believing in whatever Nolan had started and what Snyder tried to continue.”

AT&T has arguably leaned into the Snyder fandom the most as it tries to garner more attention and subscribers for its new HBO Max streaming service. After years of Warner Bros. repeatedly not saying anything about rereleasing a version of the film in theaters, the announcement of Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max came with AT&T’s official Twitter account celebrating a prickly fandom. This hasn’t stopped other Snyder fans from already replying to other AT&T tweets with pleas to #RestoreTheSnyderUniverse, demanding the director be given another shot at creating his entire superhero world, something current DC Films head Walter Hamada has no intention of doing. 

The Snyder Cut is, according to several reviews, much better than the original. It exists as a testament to having a director see their entire project through from beginning to end. But #ReleaseTheSnyderCut is not the same as Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and there is a reason why WarnerMedia is releasing it as a four-hour film with effectively no oversight on HBO Max instead of rereleasing it in theaters (even with the pandemic) and spending $100 million on marketing.

It is, as Snyder told The New York Times, a “social experiment.” The problem with an experiment is that no one knows what that means two years, five years, or three decades from now. O’Connell doesn’t believe this would have happened if Warner Bros. waited another year or HBO Max hadn’t launched. It’s a moment to appease fans and drive subscribers to a platform that WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar consistently refers to as the future of the company. 

“It’s the culmination of this entire experience: I fought and used the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, and it’s in my world, in my computer, on my TV, in my house,” Snyder said. 

That’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fandom isn’t suddenly going to disappear, as my colleague Joshua Rivera wrote at Polygon. For both the positive campaigners who are happy to finally have Snyder’s version available to watch and the negative spouting trolls who can claim victory on social media and continue fighting with people, they got what they wanted. Their tactics worked. One of the largest corporations in the United States gave in to demands from anonymous people. That’s not something people forget, and it only incentivizes a very specific type of action further. 

Netflix has more than 200 million subscribers around the world, and now the company is looking at ways to curb password sharing for both business and security reasons.

A new feature, first spotted by GammaWire, prevents people who are not authorized to use the account from accessing it. A Netflix spokesperson told The Verge, “This test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so.” If Netflix detects that someone is trying to use the account without being an account owner, they’ll be asked to verify later or verify being an account owner through an email code or text code.

If someone is unable to verify account ownership within a certain timeframe, they won’t be able to stream any Netflix content. Instead, they’ll be asked to make their own account. While this may not prevent all password sharing — hypothetically, an account owner could send their friend the code as it comes through — the idea is that it will prevent some password sharing.

The test, which isn’t specific to any one country for any specific length of time, is also being rolled out to try to better security measures around account protection. If there’s a malicious attempt to use an account for which someone may have gained a password through fraudulent methods, they won’t be able to access the account.

One of the biggest questions Netflix subscribers might have is what constitutes a household account. Netflix’s terms of service state that streaming content on the platform is “for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household.” That may mean a physical household, but the terms of service aren’t super clear. Families with kids away at college or living in different states may sign up for the family plan, for example. That’s one scenario that co-CEO Reed Hastings specifically spoke about in 2016.

“Password sharing is something you have to learn to live with,” Hastings said. “There’s so much legitimate password sharing, like you sharing with your spouse, with your kids, so there’s no bright line, and we’re doing fine as is.”

Now, however, it seems like Netflix’s teams are trying to figure out a way to combat some password sharing while also addressing tighter security measures. Password sharing has long been a concern posed by analysts and investors in the space. Analysis from Parks Associates estimated that password sharing and piracy cost companies in the streaming space around $9 billion alone. While Hastings alongside other entertainment executives have shrugged it off as something that companies have to contend with, it appears that things are beginning to change.