YouTube can fill me with existential dread.
Usually I can ignore it if I visit and watch a video or two. But with this channel the amount of time I’m thinking about YouTube increased tenfold.
It’s not YouTube itself necessarily. It’s more like all of the side effects of it. Like you get infected to think certain ways once you become a Content Creator.
There’s something strangely soulless about the word Content. But as an Official YouTube creator now I need to make this Content and if you do your YouTube research you’ll need to find your Youtube niche. To find the Content you want to talk about, think about, create and nurture within yourself until you package it up for the content farm.
So maybe it’s a gaming channel, or a channel about gaming history, or just a proper reaction channel about the latest gossip: whatever. The point is that it’s consistent, and that consistency is what’s comfortable, what’s subscribable, and also what’s sustainable.
No one wants to subscribe to a makeup channel only to be greeted with a 4 hour documentary on the evolution of door handles.
And making side-quest 4 hour documentaries makes it more difficult to develop methods on churning out things consistently. Again, this is all if you’re in the Game of Youtube and you want to play the game. But I don’t think I want to play that game.
Yet the youtube game infects the simple research of how to make good videos. Where good becomes more associated with profit rather than enjoyment I guess. It makes sense to call things good in relation to how many people want to watch it after all. But did you really enjoy it?
While in the throes of figuring out how to make these videos good – that’s what I’m here for after all – the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s no content farm I consistently want to feed. Not at the moment anyway. When this dawned on me I found myself in a mild despair about it all. Because I wouldn’t be able to make good videos.
How did it turn out this way? When I first thought about making videos I was mildly excited! It’s something new. Instead of typing, I could talk, and that’s something new. But all the researching sucked the joy out of me, making me think I need to do this and that to do youtube properly. To make a good video.
This assumption of good always being in subservience to the content machine, view counter metrics, methods, consistencies destroyed what made YouTube captivating to me – being able to just do whatever you want to.
Maybe the videos won’t be categorically good in the eyes of the seasoned youtubers. But I don’t really care if this is successful or not, whatever success means to you. I just want to talk about whatever seems valuable, capturing something, and hopefully keep the few that do want to follow along entertained.
Some out there love the YouTube game, turning this platform into an end-in-itself – making videos solely for the success. I wish them the best. I just think that once you start playing that game, you’re likely destroying the most interesting content: that which interests you.
See you in the next one.