Chapter 14: The Water Drinkers

Here is the part of the story that is bigger than Jonathan.

He started a channel about drinking water. That was the whole idea. And then, slowly, without any plan and without any encouragement from him, other people started doing it too. Not parodying it. Doing it. Numbered videos of themselves drinking water, one after another, posted to YouTube, in the exact format he had invented.

By his own count, given in an interview, there are about 75 different water-drinking channels. Know Your Meme, the internet's unofficial archive of how memes are born, documents the phenomenon as the "Drinks Water Challenge" and names Jonathan's channel as the origin. Read that again: a man drinking water on camera in Pittsburgh started a genre. Not a trend, not a meme of the week. A genre, with dozens of practitioners, a leaderboard, and a documented history.

This is the one place in this book where we can say, with evidence, that Jonathan's work caused something clearly bigger than itself. We will state exactly that, and no more, because the evidence supports exactly that and no more. He did not set out to found a movement. He set out to drink water on camera a thousand times. The movement showed up anyway.

The heart of the community is the chart. Every Jon Drinks Water video description links to it: "A chart of the top water drinkers." It is a leaderboard that ranks the water-drinking channels by their video counts and their waters-per-day, and it has a section at the bottom for dead channels, the ones that stopped posting, remembered by their last known counts. Jonathan maintains it. He built the original with formulas that pulled each channel's count automatically; when the automatic feeds broke, he repaired it with static counts and direct links and kept it current. This is worth saying carefully: the chart is a tool he maintains, the way a carpenter maintains a level. It is not who he is. It is something he keeps for the community, because somebody had to keep it and he was the somebody.

The names on the chart are real people who really did this. At the top sits Jonathan himself, past 10,030. Right behind him is Nick Drinks Water, the fan whose copycat channel inspired Jonathan to keep going past one thousand, now at 10,000 of his own. That detail deserves a second look: the imitator did not fade away. He kept drinking. He is one video count away from matching the man he imitated, and the man he imitated credits him with keeping the whole project alive. There is no jealousy in that story. There is only Jonathan's own quote about it, which is warm.

Below them the chart runs on: Aaron Drinks Water near 9,800, Matt and Kalen in the eight thousands, Dylan near 6,900, and then the long tail of smaller channels, Connor, another Aaron, Ari Drinks Water at around 2,400, Nolan, Big Mike, Martin, Al, John, and the newest arrivals doing daily short series in the dozens. The dead-channels section is its own small memorial: Nicky, Cohen, Owowatsdis, Cooper, each with a last known count and a note about where the channel went. Some renamed themselves and deleted the water videos. Some just vanished. The chart remembers them anyway.

We will not pretend to know these people. The rule for this chapter is simple: name only the verified, keep it warm, invent nothing. Nick is verified, because Jonathan named him himself as the inspiration for continuing. Ari is verified, a real water-drinking creator whose channel Jonathan knows. The rest are names on a chart, and that is enough. They are people who watched a man drink water on camera and thought: I want to do that too. The internet is full of reasons to be cynical about that sentence. This chapter is not one of them.

What Jonathan does for the small channels is the part that tells you who he is. He plans to leave supportive comments on them, the little channels with a few dozen waters, the ones nobody is watching. He does not have to do this. He is the originator of the genre; he could ignore everyone below him on the chart. Instead he goes and encourages them. It is the same instinct that made him keep going when Nick's channel appeared: somebody showed up, so the thing mattered. He has been on both sides of that sentence now, the inspired and the inspirer, and he treats the people below him the way he would have wanted to be treated when he was at video number nine hundred with almost no audience.

Then there is the fan layer, the part of the community that does not drink water on camera but shows up anyway. It started early. On June 15, 2012, a Steam community fan club called the "Jonathan Harchick Fanclub moldytoaster" was founded, and its announcements read like a drumbeat of the channel's history: "Jon Hits Bottle #1000!" and, nine years later, "Congratulations to Jon for hitting 10,000 water bottles." A decade of strangers on a gaming platform, cheering on a man drinking water.

The internet's reference works noticed, too. Urban Dictionary carries an entry for the channel: "A wholesome channel of a wholesome man hydrating himself, entertaining thousands of viewers." Read that definition one more time and notice what it does not say. It does not call him weird. It does not call it a stunt. Wholesome channel, wholesome man. That is how the internet at large filed him, and it is accurate.

In May of 2015, MetaFilter, the internet's oldest community weblog and a place not known for being easily impressed, hosted a thread about the channel. The commenters called it "internet performance art." One of them captured the entire aesthetic of the series in four words: "Glug, glug, snort of camera." That is the sound of a Jon Drinks Water video, if you have never heard one: the drinking, and then the little snort of the camera being switched off. A decade of videos, and the whole thing fits in a comment.

The chart has its own backstory, and it is a small parable about maintenance. It was originally built on formulas that pulled each channel's video count automatically from YouTube's feeds. When those feeds changed and the formulas broke, the whole chart filled with errors. Jonathan did not let it die. In 2026 the chart was repaired by hand: static counts pulled fresh from each channel's page, dead short links replaced with direct URLs, broken image columns removed, a new "Dead channels" section added at the bottom, and the old broken formulas preserved on a second sheet as reference. Somebody had to do the unglamorous work of keeping the leaderboard alive, and the somebody was him. Again.

The dead-channels section is worth lingering on, because it is the chart's conscience. Nicky Drinks Water: last known count over three thousand, channel renamed, water videos removed. Cohen Drinks Water: over eight hundred, videos removed. Owowatsdis: gone entirely, handle returns a 404. Cooper: "this channel does not exist." These are not failures. They are people who did the thing for a while and stopped, and the chart remembers them anyway, with their last known counts, like a hall of fame with the lights left on. Jonathan keeps their names on the list. That is a choice, and it is a kind one.

The living tail of the chart keeps growing, too. In 2026 a channel called "Just drinking water" joined the list, a daily shorts series that was on day twenty-five when the chart was repaired. Twenty-five waters. Everybody on that chart was once at twenty-five waters, including the man at the top with ten thousand. The chart does not laugh at twenty-five. It counts it.

And the metric that matters most on the chart, after the raw count, is waters-per-day. It is the only honest measure of the thing, because the raw count rewards longevity and the per-day number rewards devotion. A channel with two thousand waters posted over two years is doing something different from a channel with two thousand waters posted over two months, and the chart knows the difference. It is a small, nerdy, perfect piece of design, the kind of thing you build when you genuinely love the activity you are measuring.

Ari Drinks Water sits in the middle of the pack, around 2,400 waters, the series running inside a channel with a different name, the water episodes numbered and steady. Jonathan knows the channel. He knows the small ones. The plan, stated plainly, is to leave supportive comments on them. This is not a growth strategy. Nobody grows a channel by commenting on a channel with two thousand water videos. It is just encouragement, offered by the one person on the internet whose encouragement on a water video actually means something.

The fan layer around all of this is older than most people realize. The Steam fan club was founded in June of 2012, when the water count was still in the low thousands. Its announcements trace the whole arc: "Jon Hits Bottle #1000!" in the early days, and then, nine years later, "Congratulations to Jon for hitting 10,000 water bottles." Nine years. The same club, the same people, or their successors, still cheering. There is something deeply internet about that, a fan club on a gaming platform for a man drinking water, and something deeply human about it too: they showed up, and they stayed.

Urban Dictionary's entry is short enough to quote in full: "A wholesome channel of a wholesome man hydrating himself, entertaining thousands of viewers." It is a dictionary definition written by the internet about a man the internet decided to be fond of. And the MetaFilter thread from May of 2015 is the critics' verdict: "internet performance art," from a community that does not hand out that label lightly. Between the dictionary and the critics and the fan club, you have the complete reception history of the genre: the fans loved him, the reference works filed him under wholesome, and the snobs called it art. Everybody was right.

It is worth being precise about what "about 75 channels" means, because the number is doing a lot of work. These are not reaction videos. They are not parodies. They are numbered series, in Jonathan's format, of people drinking water on camera: #1, #2, #3, onward, the same silent ritual, the same numbered titles. Know Your Meme calls it the "Drinks Water Challenge" and documents Jonathan's channel as the origin, which is the closest thing the internet has to an official record. A challenge implies a beginning. Somebody did it first, and then other people did it because he did. The record says the somebody was him.

This is what separates a trend from a genre, and it is worth spelling out for readers who did not live through the era. A trend is a wave: it rises, everybody rides it, it crashes, everybody moves on. A genre is a room: somebody builds it, and then other people move in and stay. The water-drinking videos are a room. Nick moved in around 2012 and never left; he is at ten thousand himself. Aaron moved in and is near ten thousand. Dozens of others moved in and posted hundreds or thousands of waters each. Nobody told them to. There was no prize. There was just a man in Pittsburgh drinking water on camera, and the evident pleasure he took in the doing, and the thought, apparently shared by seventy-five strangers, that this looked like a good way to spend a few minutes a day.

Jonathan never claimed ownership of the room, which is part of why people stayed in it. He kept the chart, which is the opposite of gatekeeping: it is a door with a list of everyone inside. Every video description links to it. Every new channel that starts numbering its waters can end up on it. The leaderboard does not rank quality or production value or personality. It counts waters. That is the whole admission test. Drink the water, number the video, and you are on the chart.

And his own sign-off became the community's greeting. "Stay hydrated" is how he ends his replies to donors and fans, and it is the kind of phrase that sounds like nothing until you hear it ten thousand times. Then it sounds like a benediction. The Urban Dictionary definition got this exactly right: "A wholesome channel of a wholesome man hydrating himself, entertaining thousands of viewers." Wholesome is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means he never turned the thing mean. He never sold out the premise, never mocked the imitators, never treated the small channels as competition. He treated the whole phenomenon the way he treated the first video: sincerely.

So here is the honest accounting. Jonathan Harchick made a silent video of himself drinking water. He meant to make a thousand. A fan named Nick started doing it too, and Jonathan kept going. He reached ten thousand, raised money for clean water, tapered off, and kept the chart. And somewhere along the way, about seventy-five other people started their own numbered water-drinking series, and a fan club formed on Steam, and Urban Dictionary wrote him up as wholesome, and MetaFilter called it performance art, and Know Your Meme wrote down his name as the origin of the whole thing.

That is what this chapter is: the evidence that the work escaped the room. Everything else in this book is about what Jonathan made. This chapter is about what what he made, made. A man drank water on camera until the internet decided water-drinking was a thing people do. It is the one place where his work clearly caused something bigger than itself.

We state exactly that. No more. It is enough.