NOTE: After today these weekly posts are going to range from train of thought journal entries, fiction stories (that may or may not have AI influence that I'll never reveal) or some of the deeper culture opinion that I want to put out there. Just whatever I feel like writing at the time. Some will be paywalled, some will not. The videos, audios and streams have a very strict structure regarding what is paywalled and what isn't. This collumn will mostly be free, with the occasional partial or complete paywall. This Locals community will be the most freeform type of content that I do, where the other channels will all be very structured and much more narrow.
I started the YouTube channel in January of 2015. Content creation was slow because the kind of content I wanted to make was still coming to me. At first I wanted to make board gaming and vlog content, but vlogs are gay and board gaming is expensive, and producing videos about them are very very time consuming. To this day, the few board game videos on my channel are some of the highest performers.
Once I got into political content (and then cultural) I was able to grow. I found my voice, which made content creation easier to do. That, in turn, made it easier to find and get guests, to an extent. The guests always helped the channel a bit, but the Jack Murphy event is what really broke the channel into growth. After that we got into the war in Ukraine, and the biolabs story was another HUGE leap in all metrics. Then CSRQ gained me a ton of growth as well.
Notice that the majority of that growth happened in late 2021 and onward.
Of course, as soon as the events that caused the growth to happen were over, the metrics dropped again. Except subscriber counts (more or less). Views and watch time did increase a bit, but the growth period always lead to a crash. That's draining.
Then we got more into Rumble. Partially because YouTube gave us a bullshit strike. We started getting decent traction, making it to the front page a lot. But just like the semi-virality on YouTube, everything outside those events was pretty lackluster. I really wish there was a way to purge dead subscribers from a channel.
When I took the break, it was very hard to private the vast majority of the library on YouTube. I worked very hard for every view, watch minute and subscriber on that channel, and hiding (then eventually deleting) that content felt like throwing away my baby. It's hard to put the past behind you. It also made it hard when CSRQ viewers started coming in and commenting, because it left me without a huge library of content to point to. Just that saga and a mish mash of other videos with huge gaps in publish dates. Seeing the view and watch times crater was very very hard. But I had to let it go. At this point, I'm rebuilding basically from zero because moving forward the content will be very different. That's actually another difficulty, because it feels like I'm memory holing my old content to sanitize my history. That's obviously not the case, but I don't want to appear to lack integrity either.
Another huge difficulty has been simply unplugging. I want to make videos, and it's easy to see things like Simp Pool defend Eliza Bleu and think "this could be another growth point" or to see all the UFO and train crash shit and think the same. Resisting the muscle memory is tough.
It's also been difficult trying to figure out what to do next. Right now I'm considering a few options, which I discussed last week a little bit. It's the reason the rollout is going to be slow. Which is also not easy to do. I like the idea of playing with AI text generators for some of the content, but if I'm not totally sure where exactly I'll go with that yet. One idea is something I'm calling "two truths and AI" but I won't go farther than that until I start actually doing it.
The hardest part of all is being away from the community I'd gotten so used to talking with during the streams. The chats with Mitch, the weird inside jokes and discussions with the chat. The process of making.
I think I was always going to come back to creating content. I just needed to take some time to realize it. Decompressing definitely helped. And in the end, it's a new beginning.
