I view Dark Syde Phil in general as an entire phenomenon beyond Phil himself, and the negative orbiters are a part of it. I definitely view a lot of Phil's troll/stalker communities in much the same way that I view Phil: I'm fascinated and amused by them enough to occasionally watch the content they put out, but I don't sympathize with their general worldview or their level of devotion to what they do. No matter how arguably right one may be about Phil spending too much of his time, money, and energy in the wrong way, you've got to question the mentality of someone who spends time combing through several of his streams to edit together highlights with all kinds of intercut scenes and effects, stalking him, doxxing him or anyone even remotely associated with him, prying into his personal life, or putting together obscure pieces from different points in his long and tedious video history to make some kind of case. I'll still occasionally put on a detractor video to fall asleep to, but there's no way I'm going to go through the trouble of making that myself, just like I won't do the things Phil does. Plus KiwiFarms types are pretty odious in my view, being the types who want to gas what they view as "genetic trash" like autistic and trans people (and yes, I know some of those types come here and I'm a soyfaced soycucked soyboy of soyable soyful soyness and soy soy soy soy soy whatever).

Of course, being a dedicated detractor of something is an easy and fast road to online belonging, much as being a bizarrely dedicated Dark Syde Phil supporter can be to an extent (and in the extreme cases, some people are a weird combination of the two). People get drawn to curated hate content like flies to shit. It's really easy to identify something you hate and really easy to unite around that as a kind of collective catharsis and safe release of (probably mostly unrelated!) frustration. The problem is that when you build a community purely around ire and shared contempt, the sense of belonging is going to be cheap at best and prone to backfiring infighting at worst (see the nasty implosion of the WingsOfRedemption troll communities). Dark Syde Phil is, like I said, a phenomenon first, a sociological/psychological case study and longform allegorical realtime performance art that has Phil at the center and yet is also bigger than Phil himself at this point. Some people enjoy learning about morbid things like serial killers or dictators and why they did what they did without actually condoning their behavior, even becoming more strongly opposed to their actions with continued study. I'm like that with internet vortexes, especially because they're a very new phenomenon in history.

Phil, his fanbase, and his hatebase deserve each other, really. And I'm not even convinced that his most ardent detractors aren't basically alternative fans who see a lot of themselves in him (to be fair, there's a little Phil in all of us, myself included).