There has been a unique phenomenon on German-language YouTube for 8 years: the YouTuber Rainer “Drachenlord” Winkler (33) and the hatred of him. A group of people known as “haters” want to bring down the YouTuber, see it as a game, as a “kite game”, bullying and harassing the man until he loses his temper. Now they are cheering: The Dragon Lord is “defeated” because YouTube has deleted its channels, but Winkler sees it differently. Because there are now some alternatives to YouTube, such as TikTok.
What is this strange phenomenon?
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YouTube Apparently Deletes Dragon Lord Accounts Because of “Ban Evasion”
Why are his enemies cheering now? YouTube has deleted the Dragon Lord’s channels. The reason for this is apparently a violation of the guidelines of the platform. Exact details are not officially known.
One suspects it could be a penalty for “evading a content ban”, a so-called “ban evasion”:
In any case, the haters on the net are celebrating and declaring the dragon lord to be “defeated.”
Without the YouTube channel, he lost his main source of income and therefore no more resources. Some seem to want to pin the ban on themselves as a personal achievement: they tease that the channel has been “reported” to the ban.
This alludes to the idea that platforms like YouTube and Twitch will automatically ban any channel if enough people file a report. However, platforms deny that the reporting algorithm can be abused in this way.
“I’m not defeated by that!”
How does Winkler see it himself? He is surprisingly relaxed. In two videos on TikTok, Drachenlord explains in front of a green screen that he is not “defeated” at all – Winkler considers the ban on YouTube to be a small problem that will soon be solved. He still got his channel back. It’s been like this for years.
First of all: Yes, my YouTube account has been deleted. No, I’m not worried because it’s still being edited […] I’m waiting for the response from YouTube, it may take a while. I get billions of messages on Whatsapp: Höhöhö defeated! – Do I look like I’m worried?
Even if the YouTube account is gone, I’m far from defeated. First of all, I still have more than 200,000 followers here on TikTok and even if not, I still have to rework my OnlyFans a bit.
He made a “small mistake” that will now be checked and then he will continue on YouTube.
Winkler believes he’ll come back to YouTube and even if he doesn’t, “then he’ll just go to TikTok.” He also considers OnlyFans as an alternative to YouTube, a platform that actually allows other forms of creators to make a lot of money:
From his point of view, everything is clear. He’s now playing Fable 2 on Xbox and not bothering about it.
Then I’ll just make TikTok videos in the future and only that. Then I’ll make 5 TikTok videos a day instead of 3 videos – fuck it.
People on the internet want to abuse next reporting system – see dragon lord like an NPC
How’s that going? Apparently, unfortunately, the same as all the time. Calls were immediately circulating on Twitter to abuse TikTok’s reporting system so that the dragon lord would lose his channel there too.
This is behind it: What is striking is that Winkler is now playing exactly the role that the “haters” intended for him. You can see that by the way the vocabulary adapts. Where haters cheer him “defeated” like an NPC in a video game, he declares himself “far from defeated”.
The use of “defeat” around the dragon lord actually originated with an outcry from Winkler himself. Early in the entire case, he was yelling, “You’ll never defeat me!” on one of his live streams, along with a shirt that read, “Undefeated.” forever” and the desire of the haters to actually defeat the dragon lord arose from this.
In previous incidents, it was noticeable that haters see the Dragon Lord as a kind of fictionalized character, like in a TV show:
In fact, there is not even a popular case known from the USA where a content creator is so harassed and demonized over a long period of time as Winkler is in Germany. But conflicts over content creators have also escalated in the USA:
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