Ethan Klein is a lolcow of his own making

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There’s a good chance that you’ve heard the news that YouTube long-hauler Ethan Klein from h3h3productions cheated on his wife and co-host Hila Klein. And even more shocking, it seems like the affair has completely detonated his channel, an event that has already been nicknamed “Klein/11.” Klein said that he’s dropping his ownership of h3h3 and likely giving it to Hila. There’s also some talk of his team taking over the channel. But it looks like this is truly is the end for one of YouTube’s most insufferable main characters.

There’s also a good chance that you do not know what I’m talking about at all. My feeds over the weekend were full of users watching h3h3 clips for the first time and reacting with appropriate levels of befuddlement and horror. If anything, that’s the most interesting thing about Klein’s affair. It’s been a real opportunity to lift up the rock and observe Klein’s fanbase, what the streamer F.D Signifier described as the “calcified” core of “rats and vermin” that have stuck with him over the last two decades.

“I do have to ask as an old person: what kind of show is this Ethan Klein thing,” Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim wrote on X. “Because of this affair thing I’m seeing a ton of clips from the show and is it really just banter for hours?”

Even though I am, unfortunately, very aware of Klein, I confess I also don’t quite understand who is watching h3h3 in 2026. I have an easier time imagining the actual human beings in the audience of a Clavicular and Nick Fuentes livestream than I do someone like Klein. “It's so funny that the h3h3 fan base seems to be almost exclusively women who love celebrity gossip. A complete inversion of his original fan base,” one X user wrote.

Klein and his wife launched the h3h3productions channel in 2011. The name is a play on their initials (Hila’s maiden name is Hacmon and Ethan’s middle name is Edward). The channel started as a mix of “comedy” skits and reaction videos, aimed at a very specific kind of guy. Which was evident from Klein’s collaborators at the time, figures like Post Malone, George Kusunoki Miller, better known as either Filthy Frank or Joji, Jonathan “JonTron” Jafari, Oliver Tree, Pewdiepie, Ian “iDubbbz” Jomha, and Justin Roiland.

Klein’s big breakthrough was in 2016, with the release of his video “VAPE NATION,” which currently has 30 million views. With that attention, Klein quickly established himself as a major figure on YouTube. He launched his podcast and became very interested in the meta discussion of the platform. Scrolling through his earliest podcast episodes, you can see how Klein blended together YouTube drama, cringe comedy, and a fascination with the lolcow of the week. This is also when he connected with the collaborators that would go on to define the second phase of his career, personalties like Trisha Paytas and Hasan Piker, both of which he had podcasts with at one point.

There is probably a world where Klein successfully evolved into something closer to an edgier Smosh and took a step back into a proper managerial role like most of his peers. Maybe even chilled out enough to be another elder statesman of the platform like Hank Green or Casey Neistat. But that didn’t happen and, strangely enough, even his fans agree on why. In 2018, the comedian Bill Burr went on Klein’s podcast, which was streamed live, and ran circles around Klein to the point where it basically permanently altered his career.

Klein continued to make content and stream during and after the pandemic. But with the Burr episode, it became sort of impossible to pretend that Klein was a proper comedian or even an entertainer. And it’s arguable that a lot of his early fans started to move on. Klein leaned further into his livestream chat show format and embraced his new parasocial role as a hangout streamer. His podcasts with Paytas and Piker helped him replace his old audience with a new, distinctly more female one. And up until October 7th, 2023, it felt like Klein might just host low-rent gossip podcasts forever. October 7th is, once again, a nearly-universally agreed upon moment for Klein. Following Hamas’ attack, Klein, who is Jewish, and Hila, who is Israeli and served in the Israel Defense Forces, took the show to a far darker place.

Klein has spent the last three years becoming increasingly genocidal and outspoken about his hatred of Palestinians. He finally ended his friendship with Piker after a livestreamed debate last year. He sued three streamers, Denims, Frogan, and Kaceytron, over their reaction streams to a callout video about Piker. Klein has also ended his friendship with Jomha, who then released a pretty brutal response video, which covers a lot more ground than I will in this piece today. And, interestingly enough, Jomha points out that the redditors currently in the h3h3 subreddit might not even be genuine fans of his and are, increasingly, just posting ragebait in there to antagonize him. Which I think is the most interesting aspect of all of this. And also makes it nearly impossible to gauge how his fans actually feel about the affair. Assuming he has real fans still that feel any kind of way about it at all.

Because Klein has cycled through so many different audiences over the years, the only people that follow him are intensely parasocial “fans” that basically treat him like a lolcow. They post things in his Reddit to trigger him into having meltdowns on stream and they obsess over his wife and children and his employees and an affair that blows up the show is basically the only thing Klein could have done to make them truly angry. Because it means their friendship simulator has to end. And it also means that the rabid audience he cobbled together after decades of attacking and gossiping about other creators is now pointed straight back at him. His fans have already decided they know who Klein was having an affair with and are poring over every bit of footage they have of her.

Obviously, we should take everything in the h3 subreddit with a grain of salt, especially right now, but I did find one interaction in there this morning interesting. One user said that Klein should apologize to fans for making them “a part of his parasocial fanbase.” And several other users question if that was legit or not. Another user chimed in, though, writing, “Ethan fostered that parasocial relationship with viewers through his (apparently selective) openness and entire show format. I think with fewer parasocial fans it wouldn't be such a perfect denouncement of Ethan due to the connection people feel to Hila. Kind of ironic.”

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According to Reuters, Iran is weighing out options to start attacking undersea cables in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, this would not actually shut down the internet. It would probably mess up some financial markets, but most of the internet would be fine.

So maybe it’ll be AI that finally brings the internet down. Hacks from AI swarms or exacerbated by AI swarms and rogue agents have gotten so bad even the official Digimon X account is posting about it. (It’s basically the plot of Digimon: The Movie (which rocks)). Here’s a non-exhaustive, but still alarming list of hacks that have happened in the last few days.

Quest Diagnostics experienced a breach and it’s still unclear exactly how many patients had their records exposed and to what extent.

Japanese companies Park24 and GMO Internet were attacked and saw stock prices tumble. There have reportedly been over 700 cybersecurity incidents in Japan in the last six days. One take I read recently was that Japan was especially at risk because the country has a vast bureaucracy tied to aging or out of fashion internet standards and a (for now) robust economy.

Websites around the world are still struggling to patch vulnerabilities in the PHP coding language recently exposed by AI.

Oh, and, American banks are reporting that unauthorized agent swarms are attacking various accounts now.

As The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong wrote over the weekend, “welcome to the valley of pain.” If you haven’t imagined a world without the internet, well, it’s probably time you do.

Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva beat Flavio Bolsonaro last night in a major upset. Da Silva came in second in the first round of voting earlier this month and, for the first time in Brazilian history, won the second round. We’ve got some fascinating data on the election.

The user with the most month-to-month growth on Instagram this month was Andre Janones, pictured above getting his head rubbed by Da Silva. Janones was the architect of the “Lula’s Army” WhatsApp channel, which had more than 10 million followers in it. Da Silva had the second-biggest growth on Instagram, beating out Bolsonaro.

Welcome back IGTV! Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the platform was launching a new feature called, uh, Features. The launch of Features is arriving with a whole host of new long-form, uh, features meant to compete with YouTube.

You’ll be able to upload 90 minute videos and organize them as series. It also supports vertical microdramas and livestreams. Social media analyst Rachel Karten has a screenshot of how it’ll all look in the Reels tab, which definitely isn’t confusing at all. Oh, there’s also going to be a TV app. One of the more interesting ideas Instagram is trying out is the ability to link up to eight clips to a longer video. This would basically turn clips into pullquotes that link back to the full video. YouTube Shorts can kind of do this, but I haven’t seen it work super well.

Variety reported that Instagram Features has one very important difference to YouTube. It still won’t be sharing ad revenue with creators. They are apparently giving some creators money directly to make stuff, but there’s no revenue-sharing plans for now. To hear Mosseri tell it, he’s actually been the one blocking the YouTubeification of the platform. Clearly someone — or a particular platform’s recently stock price wobble — convinced him to finally go all in.

My thinking is starting to shift on the YouTube/Netflix battle and the larger war for the American television. I assumed that YouTube would beat Netflix by finding low-cost ways of recreating prestige TV from first principles. I’m starting to think that’s not how it’s going to work. The big bet in Silicon Valley is that Americans don’t actually want prestige at all actually. Instagram moving to TVs confirms this for me. The hope is that you can build a well-working TV app that can play the same hyper-personalized user-generated-ish content and serialized social TV shows that users are consuming on their phones all day. It makes sense when you think about it. Why spend money becoming the new Netflix when you can kill the very concept that you would ever want to watch quality, well-made productions on a TV. Bleak!

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