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SEEDS vs Glitter What’s the difference between something that shines and something that grows? In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on two defining professional moments:• The day my YouTube channel hit one million subscribers• And a quiet opportunity today that may change my life — slowly, softly, and without spectacle This is a story about virality, algorithms, golden play buttons, glitter,...

Episode Title: Babezilla & Canada’s Tallest Man: A Tale of Two Giants In this week’s episode of Unsubscribe , Rebecca shares two surreal behind-the-scenes stories from her time working inside the world of viral YouTube content creation: stories that reveal how the internet distorts scale, identity, and even humanity itself. In Tale One, she becomes “Babezilla,” the accidental muse of a fan who dig...

Six months after moving from London to Toronto and joining a rapidly growing YouTube channel, my life had transformed at electric speed. Journalism gave way to trending listicles, and subscriber counts climbed toward one million. And then I Googled my name. What I found wasn’t interest in my reporting, my writing, or my voice. Instead, I discovered an entire corner of the internet dedicated to rat...

Trigger warning: this chapter contains graphic hate speech. The Comments Section I reflect on my years working on YouTube at the height of the platform’s most chaotic era, when anonymity, scale, and engagement collided to create a culture where cruelty was not only normalized, but rewarded. What began as a tool for community quickly became something darker: a digital space where distance eroded em...

Baby’s First Million Unsubscribe Episode 4 Episode Description / Show Notes What does it actually feel like to go viral? In this episode, I unpack the moment everything changed: the first million views. The dopamine hit. The disbelief. The sudden, disorienting sense of scale. And the uncomfortable truth that the internet doesn’t reward depth — it rewards repetition, recognisability, and low cognit...

Episode 3 of the Unsubscribe Podcast. An unwitting social media star reflects on her journalism training in London, and wonders how it led her to creating YouTube videos with explicit thumbnails. Read by the author, Rebecca Felgate. Recorded in Calgary, Alberta. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rebeccafelgate....

In 2015, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto, Canada. All I had with me was 23lbs of luggage. That’s the short list, anyway. The long list actually goes: * 23lbs of luggage * A boyfriend * An arts degree * A post-graduate diploma in Journalism and, most notably * a slew of HOPES & DREAMS The biggest of which would have gone something along the lines of: “make Toronto my bitch”. T O R O N T O. Fuc...

In 2015, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto, Canada. All I had with me was 23lbs of luggage. That’s the short list, anyway. The long list actually goes: * 23lbs of luggage * A boyfriend * An arts degree * A post-graduate diploma in Journalism and, most notably * a slew of HOPES & DREAMS The biggest of which would have gone something along the lines of: “make Toronto my bitch”. T O R O N T O. Fuc...

After four high-octane years as the face of a YouTube channel watched by millions of people across the world, I finally plucked up the courage to quit. I say courage, but by that point, it was as much a reflex as it was the actions of a renegade. I physically could not make myself perform the gestures of duty any longer. It was do or die, and I couldn’t give another of the dwindling hours of my yo...

Unsubscribe : notes from within the machine from a girl who once lived. there. Episode 1: Escape Velocity / Freedom An audio accompaniment to the Unsubscribe newsletter, read by the author, Rebecca Felgate. At age 26, journalism graduate Rebecca became the face of a YouTube channel that would quickly go viral. Exploding to six million subscribers in under four years, "The Channel" was, at one poin...