Question & Answer

>I probably some hot takes here, but I’m very mixed on my feelings. I’ll go over the various groups I know best.

>Overall, there are some fantastic, kind, welcoming people in the community that has formed around the show! Talented artists who produce amazing works that help keep the community together. I think it’s important to remember that there’s a lot of good here besides the bad, and it would be good to make this place somewhere that is more open to new people coming in.

>The chuds are just an awful, miserable people, who don’t really care for the show, to the point they have their own name for the show because they’re too lazy to learn how to say a word that is not in their language. It’s unfortunate they need to be brought hope given how toxic they are, but the best we can do is not associate with them, hope they grow up, and move on with their lives.

>I find the 4chan users tend to be annoying. They are not like the chuds in that I think they do actually care about the show and are not acting with malicious intent. They are mostly internationals who want everyone else to worship them as they claim the show’s audience traces back solely to them. It’s true that circulation on 4chan did play a role in it, but if it wasn’t for 4chan, I think another site would’ve brought attention to it or even the YouTube algorithm just planting it in peoples’ feeds like it did mine would have done the trick. At this point I’ve had more than one interactions with 4chan users who boast how ‘important’ they were in 2018/2019 for spreading Deel 1 and the later Deel 1 + 2. This is something a lot of earlier Dutch viewers I’ve spoken with tend to dispute, saying there was very little non-Dutch audience before 2020. I am probably biased here, but I am more willing to believe the long-time Dutch viewers than the 4chan users trying to place a crown on themselves.

>YouTube is a mix of both the good and the bad, with creators and commenters who are cool and do amazing work, though some I suspect like interacting with or are chuds themselves. Comment sections on Ongezellig fan videos tend to be toxic from chuds using terms from their website.

>Massadonië is an… interesting place. There’s a lot of different kinds of people there, and some are really cool, some are alright, and some do more harm than good IMHO but are allowed to stay either because they’ve been there a long time or reasons I don’t really know. It’s seems somewhat segregated, with a primarily Dutch general chat and an English-only general chat, with a few channels that cross over. A lot of discussion on content there is over Ongezellig despite Studio Massa moving on from it. The majority of the Dutch-speaking members are indifferent or just hostile to non-Dutch members, though given one of the groups I mentioned earlier I feel the suspicion is not without reason. Most of them don’t care about the show and have moved on. We’ll see how/if the environment there changes at all.