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Notes -
I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.
They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.
So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.
As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.
So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.
Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.
I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.
The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.
There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.
I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.
I dunno. His whole shtick ended up coming off as fiddling as Rome burns, and I'm not sure how much I buy his moral disgust, when he explicitly promoted some of these personalities in what seems like an attempt to get at people he considered "cringe".
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