What’s your first memory of using the internet? For many of us Gen Zers, the internet has always been part of our lives. We aren’t the generation that grew up with iPads in our hands from birth (looking at you, Gen Alpha), but we’re the first generation of internet natives. And when you grow up on the internet, inevitably, you outgrow the persona you had online as a kid or teenager.
No one person better encapsulates the Gen Z online experience than YouTuber and Twitch Streamer Tom “TommyInnit” Simons, the annoying British teenager in the red-and-white shirt who blew up online during the COVID-19 lockdown for roleplaying the American Revolution on a “Minecraft” server.
Simons uploaded his first video as a 14-year-old to his YouTube channel TommyInnit in 2018. At the end of that year, he also began streaming on Twitch. By 2021, Simons held the world record for the most followed Minecraft channel on Twitch, with 5,296,209 followers, and the record for the most viewers of a Minecraft gameplay live stream on Twitch with 650,237 viewers.
Simons’ success was in large part due to the “DreamSMP,” an extremely popular Minecraft roleplay server that many famous Minecraft players streamed on. Today, Simons’ YouTube channel has 15.1 million subscribers and his Twitch channel has 7.3 million followers.
While he still uploads Minecraft content, in the last year, there has been a major shift in Simons’ channel. Beginning in October 2024, he started uploading a series of videos that harken back to an early internet style. They almost act like video diaries. In each of these videos, Simons drops his usual loud, silly personality. He’s honest and a little broken, even, as he talks about his experience as a capital-Y YouTuber, as well as his mental health. In a video titled, “a very bad year,” he opens up about his parents’ divorce and the grief he’s been experiencing after seeing the bed where his friend and fellow YouTuber Technoblade passed away. (Technoblade revealed in a video that his first name was Alex, but his last name is unknown.)
Simons doesn’t want to be a kid who streams Minecraft forever. This is in part because the YouTubers he spent his adolescence looking up to turned out to be, well, pretty shitty people. Through the jokes Simons makes, as well as the more serious conversations he’s had in his videos and on his podcast “Shut Up I’m Talking,” it’s clear that being around those people at a young age took a toll on him.
It’s a systemic issue, not just a few bad apples. The first video Simons uploaded in this more nuanced, nostalgic style is titled “youtube’s changed.” In it, he details his dislike of what YouTube has become, and that he’s spent a year trying to move away from social media and into the world of professional comedy.
“When I chat with comedians now about comedy, all they talk about is the quality of what they do — how funny it was, the timing, the nuances, the delivery, the specific details of how they can improve and hone their craft,” Simons says in this video.
Simons then goes on to talk about YouTubers. “All they talk about is how they have enough banger, how they can get more attention. Because that’s what it tells you to want, to feel to need.”
One month later, Simons uploaded a song titled “The Internet’s Getting Worse.” The song, while nothing special instrumentally, stopped me dead in my tracks. It encapsulated the feeling of watching the internet shrink from this comforting, impossibly huge, and magical space — the way it felt as a kid — to a place made up of people trying to sell you things or call you a slur.
There are a few hidden messages throughout the music video. (You can only see them if you know to look, and you hit pause at exactly the right moment.) One expresses how upsetting it is for Simons that he can never go back and watch his old content because the people he used to make videos with turned out not to be who they said they were. Another is about how he was stuck in a loop of constantly feeling like he needed the love of an audience to be happy.
But the one resonant message is clear: “If you find a corner of this world wide web that has any substance at all, then please stick to it. The hundreds of millions of people that now place absolutely no value on their time, their precious time, and spend it watching soulless content designed to hold their attention is depressing. This all depressed me. There is so little substance in this mess of a world wide web, so little heart or soul or love. If you find any substance, stick to it.”
Earlier this year, on his podcast, Simons spoke about how he plans to retire from YouTube within the next five years to pursue comedy. He is currently on an international stand-up tour, including a show at The Vic Theatre in Chicago on May 9.
Simons just turned 21, and on April 18 he posted the fourth installment of these quieter, sentimental, videos, this time titled “21.” As he’s discussing his stand-up tour, for the first time in one of these videos, he seems genuinely happy. It’s a kind of happiness that’s different from the loudmouthed teen he used to be. It’s mature and bittersweet.
TommyInnit is not the next George Carlin or even John Mulaney. Much of the comedy he’s been doing on YouTube feels derivative of others, such as “Saturday Night Live’s” “Weekend Update” segment.
In the last few seconds of “The Internet Is Getting Worse,” Simons tells the viewer, “I know it sounds too much like Bo Burnham, but soon it’ll sound like Tom Simons, just give me time to figure out what that means.”
