Nick Polom gives his reason why Ninja’s New Year’s flossing moment was cringeworthy

By now, we’ve all seen the clip. Ninja appeared on broadcast TV during Times Square’s New Year’s Eve celebration at the end of 2018. And with rainy weather dampening the mood, the quirky personality struggled to get the crowd to join in on the floss dance. 

“I’m not seeing enough movement,” he said.

The moment is among the most uncomfortable in the history of gaming and streaming. And today, Nick Polom ranked it on a tier list with other cringe-inducing videos.

But the element of that video that made it most cringeworthy, according to Polom, wasn’t what you might expect. For Polom, the unsettling part of the video wasn’t necessarily Ninja’s inability to move the crowd with his enthusiasm. It was the ignorance of the host.

Watching the back end of the video, as Ninja went to take a selfie with the crowd as a backdrop, you could hear a comment from the hostess of the Times Square Ball Drop, Allison Hagendorf.

“Everyone, if you want to check out Ninja go to Twitch.com/Ninja,” she said.

Anyone who knows anything about Twitch culture can immediately identify where Hagendorf made her mistake. Twitch’s URL is Twitch.tv, not Twitch.com. For Polom, the mistake by Hagendorf represented more than just her personal ignorance about Twitch. It showed just how foreign streaming culture still was to the mainstream consumer in 2018.

“That right there should explain to you why no one flossed,” he said. “Because no one knows who the fuck that is. They have no idea what he’s doing, what he does for a living, why he’s so popular… he was too soon. He blazed the trails for the rest of us to get to the mainstream.”

The records that Ninja set for Twitch in terms of viewership and subscriptions in 2018 were so remarkable that they stood for multiple years afterward, despite Twitch being a consistently growing platform. The success of Ninja and Fortnite that year initiated a shift into the mainstream for Twitch, but that very humbling moment, which Ninja himself often jokes about now, was proof of how much further streaming had to go.