This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Top 20 Facebook Partner
When Facebook finally gave me the opportunity to be a partner, it felt surreal. The invitation appeared to have been delayed for months because of a glitch with my page. My viewers kept encouraging me to contact support, and when I did, support told me there was nothing they could do. Yet, the very next day, I suddenly got the opportunity to apply for partnership, and Facebook quickly approved my page.
I was horrified when I opened the partner agreement. Buried inside were secret terms and conditions, a nondisclosure agreement, and shocking restrictions. Some were clearly there to manipulate public opinion on critical issues, but others made no logical sense. I discovered I had to agree not to talk about certain things, and/or to only present one approved point of view. While a few line items might have been predictable, many were not, and I was stunned to see how tightly Facebook wanted to control what partners could and couldn’t say. It felt like I was only allowed to speak in one direction, and anything that even hinted at another perspective was forbidden.
I was so desperate to be a partner that I didn’t hesitate. I had wanted it for so long that I immediately clicked “agree” and told myself I would figure it out later. Yet it didn’t take long before I stopped caring about the rules. Once I had the partner badge on my page, it lost its magic. The agreement claimed Facebook wouldn’t promote partner pages more than anyone else, but in my experience, that wasn’t true at all. Being verified and having the partner tag gave my page superpowers.
For example, one day I streamed GoldenEye, and the video got nearly a million views. I made thousands of dollars in ad revenue from less than 2 hours of “work” playing a video game I have loved as a teenager. Other people tried streaming the same game, and their streams went nowhere. I replicated that success with a string of retro games. At first, I only turned to retro titles because I was burned out and wanted an alternative to Warzone. To my shock, retro games hit the algorithm hard and made it clear I had discovered a secret weapon.
A member of the Facebook team even contacted me asking me to explain what I was doing. What I realized was that if I played a retro game the algorithm already had data for, there was a large potential audience and my page could reach it. When I streamed Top Gun or NBA Jam, the algorithm already had tons of data from people interested in the Top Gun movie or the new Space Jam film. During the live stream itself, the engagement looked ordinary, but afterward, the on-demand replay would get pushed out to massive audiences. This strategy took me to the absolute peak of my Facebook success, even bigger than my Warzone era. By the end of 2021—I was making more than $10,000 a month.
You might think I would have been perfectly happy at that point. In some ways, I was. I lived large during days where I went to a local retro video game store and spent thousands of dollars on games and retro systems to stream. I had hundreds of paying supporters on my page giving me $5 a month in exchange for a badge next to their name in live chat. For the first time since 2018, I was back to being the primary income provider for my family, and that felt amazing. Yet deep down, it didn’t make me happy. It all felt shallow and fragile. I kept streaming retro games, kept going off in the algorithm again and again, but underneath the success, I carried a nagging sense that there had to be something more.
The memory of that mother ignoring her kids at the park to moderate my live stream haunted me. I kept asking myself: seriously, is playing video games really the best I can offer humanity? With everything I know, with everything I have to say, is the highest use of my life standing shirtless or in a tube top, streaming retro games, and pretending that I’m helping people? That thought drilled into me, making me restless and dissatisfied.
Everything or Nothing to Lose?
The more I spiraled, the more reckless I became. It amazed me how for years I had wanted the Facebook partner badge so badly, and within just a few months, I didn’t care about it anymore. The feeling grew inside me that this wasn’t going to last. At the same time, I refused to let fear of losing my partner badge and income silence me. I wasn’t going to tiptoe around, scared of breaking the rules. I started blatantly violating the partner agreement. Fortunately, nobody except other partners could report me for violating the NDAs I had agreed to. My viewers had no way to hold me accountable for that, and the other Facebook partners didn’t snitch. They didn’t seem to want to, because many of them were hoping I’d hype up their pages and promote them. I poured money into that, giving thousands and thousands of dollars to other streamers just to get shoutouts.
One night, I gave $100 to Ronda Rousey while she was streaming Metroid for charity. My viewers jumped into her chat and told her who I was. She ended up raiding me twice over the next month, which was awesome. For those unfamiliar with the term raiding, that means she sent thousands of her viewers my way when her live stream was ending. With other Facebook gamers I respected, the ones I felt were actually honest, I dropped big tips too. StoneMountain64 got hundreds of dollars in tips which were basically just ads for my stream. He never raided me, but he did hit like on some of my videos which brought thousands of his viewers over to my page.
This was the reality of being a content creator online. It could literally be as simple as giving someone money, and they would reciprocate. Of course, it wasn’t always satisfying. Plenty of times I dropped $100 on a creator, and they barely reacted. Some barely acknowledged me at all, even though I was one of the top gamers on Facebook, their chat knew exactly who I was, and I had just given them the largest tip they would get that week. Some creators were so wealthy and disconnected that they could hardly appreciate someone tipping them $100. Other times, though, the opposite happened. Some creators went absolutely nuts, promoting me hard and sending what felt like their entire pages over to follow me. These swings were part of what made me a huge deal on Facebook Gaming. By the end of 2021, I placed among the top 20 gaming partners in the Facebook Stars contest.
By 2022, though, my content started shifting into stranger territory as I was diving deeper into conspiracies after years of watching shows like Ancient Aliens and UFO Hunters. I even did a live interview on Facebook with an author who said he had been abducted by aliens and taken off the Earth—and I actually believed him. His name is Tony Rodrigues and I loved his book Ceres Colony Cavalier. I also started doing outrageous stand-up comedy during my live streams in a desperate attempt to have more fun. I told jokes that pushed hard against sensitive subjects. Some viewers loved it while others were deeply offended and said they were reporting me. For me, the purpose was to promote laughter and challenge myself to find humor in the worst of subjects.
What made this phase ironic was that my verified checkmark and partner badge gave me a kind of immunity. Smaller creators would have been destroyed if even a handful of people reported their content. But for me, even with hundreds of people reporting me when I pissed them off, Facebook didn’t automatically take my posts down or seem to even review the reports. I could get away with things most creators couldn’t even attempt because any actions against my page appeared to require manual intervention.
By February 2022, though, I was miserable. The fun was gone. Retro games no longer excited me. The new version of Call of Duty: Warzone came out, and it sucked. My viewers weren’t supporting me like they used to although I was still making thousands every month. I felt bored, restless, and desperate for an idea that could break through what I saw as the matrix of control. I wanted something that could take me beyond just chasing views and income. I wanted to find something that could actually elevate the consciousness of humanity.
Talk to Someone Before Doing Something Stupid
Around this time I published a video on February 9, 2022 titled “Talk to Someone Before Doing Something Stupid,” and its message matters for what comes next. The heart of it was simple: when you are stuck on a dark or destructive impulse, the worst thing you can do is hold it close and run with it alone. Tell someone who knows and loves you—not just a stranger on the internet, but a real person who has lived beside you. Isolation and secrecy are where the danger grows; connection and honesty are what bring you back. I have learned that being around people is medicine and loneliness is poison, so I force myself to show up even when I would rather isolate. I have also come to believe our struggles are not life sentences—with time, support, community, and taking care of ourselves, they can ease and heal, which is why I treat staying connected as a daily practice. What is ironic is that even as I preached all of this, I knew how tempting it is to do the opposite: to take a wild thought, hold it close, and run with it alone. That is exactly the trap, and that is where things get dangerous.
With that in mind, let’s see what I did the next week where I hit the peak of my online fame!
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.