Are we watching the Enshittification of Swissbeatbox?

I’ve been hanging out on r/beatbox recently. Navigating the great enshittening has taken me from one social media platform to the next, so at the moment, it’s mostly Reddit and Instagram. Twitter is a cesspool for hate, Facebook is also hate but somehow boring (??) and I am not good enough at social media to gain traction on newcomers like Bluesky. Oh well. (Follow me on social media please lmfao!! The content is good even if i’m not “good at social media.”)

For those who don’t know about the great enshittening, is a theory by the writer Cory Doctorow about the decline in the quality of the tech products that dominate our lives. The process, he explains, has three steps. 

“First, it is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies.”

The process isn’t malicious. It is a product of tech companies getting too big. Maybe next year, this theory suggests, Reddit will surge in usage among the type of culture-setting folks who make a social media platform blow up and I will need to find a new place to talk about beatbox because at a certain size, Reddit, or any other tech company is so big it doesn’t have to be good anymore. 

The irony, as I look to Reddit for refuge from the great enshittening, is that r/beatbox is aflame with discussion of another enshittening, and this time, it’s Swissbeatbox that has supposedly become shit.

Though Reddit is far from the biggest platform for beatbox discussion — it is at most, the fourth biggest forum after YouTube, Discord, and Instagram — the debate about Swissbeatbox has raged with deep intensity. “Where are the uploads? What’s with all these livestreams? Why are the battle livestreams paywalled?” Ask Swissbeatbox’s critics. “Why can’t you be happy with all that we have?” retort its defenders. 

The interesting point is that neither side says that Swissbeatbox is as it has always been. There isn’t a contingent saying that the post-GBB video rollout in 2023 matches that of 2018, or that the shoutout system in 2024 mirrors that of 2016. 

Things are different with Swissbeatbox these days, and all the parties agree on that. Some of the redditors feel that this different isn’t good, or, more likely, not bad, but not good enough either. Others seem willing to accept whatever is put in front of them. Would you rather go back to ventrillo and grainy videos like in 2011 in the pre-Swissbeatbox days, feels like the straw man argument hiding behind some of the posts. 

Turning back to Doctorow, I think we have to consider how Swissbeatbox became the hegemon it is in order to decide if they are yet another example of enshittening. 

Back in 2013, the year Swissbeatbox launched the GBB in its modern form, the beatbox landscape was different. Uploads to all the biggest channels (read: Beatbox Battle TV) were sporadic, and the only other major event was the world champs, which only happened every few years. The quality of the few videos that did get uploaded was so dreadfully low, viewers would have to guess at the full spectrum of sound made by beatboxers.

In response to these conditions, Swissbeatbox made the following promises to beatbox fans, some explicit and some implied, all to show that they would change the state of play in the beatbox world:

1. We will upload a video every day at 5:00 am EST.
2. We will host our flagship battle every year.
3. We are committed to improving the production value of all our events, videos, and properties.
4. We will offer operational support for your battle, wherever it is, if you let us stream it on our platform

People will point to the GBB as the single greatest driver of Swissbeatbox’s growth over the past decade, and one is hard pressed to suggest a different option. Nonetheless, I think that Swissbeatbox uploaded videos every day for years on end so that the GBB videos could take the channel to its current heights. Look at what I wrote back in 2018:

5:00 am EST, 10:00 am CET, 5:00 pm KST. Choose a time zone, it doesn’t matter which. At one of these times (or all of them if you want to be meta), Andreas Fraefel uploads a new video to Swissbeatbox, his YouTube channel.

In the days and weeks after a battle event, the videos feature battles, carefully uploaded one by one to increase suspense, and when it isn’t battle season, Fraefel — better known by his stage name Pepouni — uses his channel to feature beatboxers’ new routines.

I can’t prove this theory without access to Swissbeatbox’s back end data, but it is my read that the increased frequency of beatbox content, both in shoutouts and battles (promises 1 and 2), created the conditions for beatboxers to treat Swissbeatbox as the unofficial hub for beatboxing. Their commitment to stepping up production quality (promise 3) — in addition to making their videos more marketable for broad audiences — created the conditions for smaller organizers to ask Swissbeatbox for help running their events (promise 4). 

This is how you see the 2018 Werewolf Beatbox Battle, 2016 American Beatbox Championship, 2013 French Beatbox Championship and other random national events on Swissbeatbox. Back when Pepouni would answer my emails and Whatsapps (call me bro, I don’t bite) he told me that the hardest part of scheduling our interviews was sneaking them in among all the travel. 

I texted him in the summer of 2019 to fact check something for the podcast, and he said he was in Barcelona for the Spanish Champs. “Are you doing video?” I asked. “Judge,” he responded, but he added that he had his camera on hand “just in case.”

In each of their promises, and especially the anecdote about the Spanish champs, you see Swissbeatbox following Doctorow’s process of growth and enshittification to a tee. They made their product the best in the game, swallowed up competition, and brought peak Swissbeatbox in 2019. They were still uploading daily videos, and they hosted the best beatbox event in history in the 2019 GBB. 

Between the hype of 2019, the isolation and the YouTube boom of Covid, and promises of a World League to come, Swissbeatbox began to cruise, cutting back on shoutouts and focusing more on promoting their events. Eventually, when they took a break from uploading after the disaster that was the 2021 GBB, they entirely stopped uploading daily videos. (Sometime around then I remember asking my brother, when did I stop caring about Swissbeatbox shoutouts? “I don’t know,” he said, “but I don’t care about them either.” At some point, shoutouts, once a staple of the Swissbeatbox brand, stopped mattering to them, and soon after to us. 

As I recently wrote, 2023 saw Swissbeatbox withdraw significantly, posting less and less on YouTube and Instagram (one of the key complaints on Reddit). With 4.85 million subscribers on YouTube and no competitors to speak of, it seems Swissbeatbox is comfortable cutting back on consistency knowing that what little content they upload, fans will gobble up. (“Don’t be so toxic!” say those fans, to any others who miss the consistency and abundance of mid-2010s Swissbeatbox.) They haven’t even bothered to set new expectations. 

So here we are, debating whether Swissbeatbox is no longer meeting its past high standards on r/beatbox. It is unclear who benefits from these changes in Swissbeatbox behavior. It is unclear how Swissbeatbox benefit beyond the decreased workload. Without wading too deep into this debate, I struggle to see how this new, withdrawn, Swissbeatbox benefits beatboxing fans. 

The question then, in a Doctorow reading of the beatbox community, is how might Swissbeatbox find itself in a less powerful position, where this pattern of coasting and meeting none of the standards that they themselves once set would be insufficient to maintain their perch at the top of the beatbox content totem poll.

For Doctorow, the answer is legislation. Blocking mergers and consolidation will open the doors again for competition, which will push tech platforms to deliver on the promises they once made. In beatbox, there is nothing stopping another organization or player from entering the fray and uploading daily videos in hopes of unseating Swissbeatbox. (Imagine if Adam Corre came back and attempted this. Given the number of subscribers he has, it would be quite interesting to see how it played out.)

But in the meantime, with no competitor waiting in the wings, and Swissbeatbox happy to milk a few content moments for a year of videos, I find this debate on r/beatbox a little silly. It is good that Swissbeatbox uploads the videos it does. It is awesome that these videos are high quality. It would obviously be better if Swissbeatbox uploaded good videos every day. It would be better if they communicated more with their fans. Being present used to matter to them, and it should now.

To those who call these facts (because they are facts) or the people who share them dramatic or toxic, I would say that this is a fairly benign reading of the situation, and holding Swissbeatbox to the standards it once set is pretty much the only thing fans can do in the face of Swissbeatbox’s changes. And also, when Swissbeatbox is just a couple years removed from accusations of workplace abuse, abetting a sexual assault and ignoring any and all calls for public reforms, it is certainly a choice to use the word toxic against fans who politely criticize its business plan. 

Swissbeatbox isn’t evil like Facebook. And it hasn’t enshitted to the same extent as the social media giant either, but perhaps that is simply a matter of opportunity. Swissbeatbox doesn’t have nearly enough power to let people down the way Facebook and other tech platforms have. 

I’ve written variations on shit a dozen times now, which, by my estimation, sets the SpeshFX record for swearing by a dozen, so I will stop here. Swissbeatbox is good, also bad, and could be better. Reddit be redditing. Nothing is new under the sun. Subscribe to SpeshFX.

Upcoming Calendar: Events

• Etude Op.1 Battle: Seoul, South Korea. February 28, 2024.
• Dub Phizix Strategy: Vienna, Austria. March 1, 2024.
• Beatbox of the Month: Berlin, Germany. March 3, 2024.
• Jam Session Beatbox: Nantes, France. March, 8, 2024.
• Italian Beatbox Championship: Venice, Italy. March 9-10, 2024.
• Saarland Beatbox Championship: Saarbrücken, Germany. March 16, 2024.
• CUBE UNITE: Tokyo, Japan. March 31, 2024.
• Florida Beatbox Battle: Agen, France. April 5-6, 2024.
• Jairo at Dance Alive Japan: Tokyo, Japan. April 14, 2024.
• Beatcity Japan PRE: Tokyo, Japan. May 3, 2024.
• German Beatbox Championship: Berlin, Germany. May 10, 2024.
• World Wide Beatbox Festival 2024: Maggie Valley, North Carolina (USA). May 16-19.
• Yamori at Hakuba Yahooo! Festival 2024: Nagano, Japan. May 26, 2024.
• Great North Battle: Toronto, Canada. June 1-2, 2024.
• FlowCase 10: Cardiff, Wales. June 22, 2024.
• Boice Less Festival: Shikoku, Japan. July 13-14, 2024.
• Vokal Total: Graz, Austria. July 16-20, 2024.
• Haten World Championship: Yokohama, Japan. July 25-28, 2024.
• Circlejam Beatbox Festival: Ferlach, Austria. July 26-27, 2024
• Solar Storm Festival: Location TBD, August 29, 2024.
• Beatcity Japan: Tokyo, Japan. September 7, 2024.
• Beatbox Battle of the Year: Ghent, Belgium September 21, 2024.
• Grand Beatbox Battle: Toyosu PIT, Japan. November 1-3, 2024.

Upcoming Calendar: Wild Cards

• Etude Op.1 Battle: Open until February 28, 2024.

• Mad Twinz remix contest: Open until March 6, 2024.

• Grand Beatbox Battle:

  • Solo and Loopstation: Open until March 9, 2024.

  • Tag Team, Crew, Producer: Open until March 23, 2024

• Haten World Championship (Solo, Tag-Team & Loopstation): February 2nd - April 30th, 2024.

• World Wide Beatbox Festival: dates coming soon.

If I missed any upcoming events or Wild Cards, hit me up on Instagram, I’m @HateItOrLevitt or @SpeshFX.