The most depressing conversation I've ever had online was with an Aspiring Content Creator on a Discord who insisted that they had to be as loud and obnoxious as possible to compete with other YouTubers, because Content is a zero-sum game, everyone is your competitor, and you are all fighting over the same audience. So your only option is to do what they're doing.
Obviously so much of that is wrong, and it's important to have your own voice. But I think what really hit me about it was the image of somebody who has resigned their life to making videos they don't like to share with people they don't like, because that's something they think they're supposed to do. Why get into it at all??
It baffles me why so many people think this is a good life path. I knew a friend-of-a-friend who threw away their successful early career to pivot to becoming a streamer, and it completely destroyed their life, they had no income for years, their long-term partner left them, and so on.
It is extremely possible to just... not do that? What's the allure of Becoming A Creator and obligating yourself to that?
I will preface this by saying that every single person who has ever gotten popular on YouTube or any of the other user content sites has done so through serendipity, and my level of popularity is only barely related to the choices I've made; I was in the right place at the right time doing something that people were not getting elsewhere, but it was by sheer accident and the same is true for everybody else I know of who's gotten popular.
I do not sit on any kind of high horse about my success; I'm lucky that what I'm doing is working well enough to pay my bills, but it gives me no moral high ground to criticize somebody else for having to "play the game" to get by.
but that's actually what sucks about this.
see, since I look for niche things very frequently, I am often putting interesting search terms into YouTube, and they frequently turn up results from people who are trying to play the game. And failing. Overwhelmingly often, they are failing.
It is not fun or funny to point and laugh at somebody who has been putting their heart and soul into creative work for 6 years or longer and is visibly not getting the return on investment and engagement that they hoped for. That is a sad story every time it happens, and I expected to be that person, so I just cross my fingers and hope that they get discovered like they deserve.
But what I do point and laugh at, very often, are the people who are very obviously trying to do this grind set shit and also getting no results. There are millions of accounts doing it. Hundreds or thousands of videos across years and years, 4 to 8 every single week. 20 views. 100 views. 5 views. No comments, ever.
And they're doing it all, the soyjak pointing thumbnails, the absurd reality TV bullshit, the reaction content, shock content, "tradfamily exploitation" content (you either know what I mean or you don't), they're doing it all, following every tip from every shitty redditor, every YouTube grifter, they're clearly putting a full-time job worth of effort into this, often twice over (since it is so, so, so frequently couples doing this) and they have been doing it for over 5 years and are seeing absolutely nothing for their effort. They don't even have enough followers to turn on ads.
I have no moral high ground about the way I run my channel. I have no sage advice if you want to try this; It is a meat grinder like any other gig job, like any other job really, and YouTube pays their bills on the backs of other people's largely wasted labor. But I will say this: The grind set shit is not a guarantee of success, and I am proof that acting like a fairly normal human fucking being is not a guarantee of failure. so don't buy into the bullshit, don't do the grindset shit unless you have somehow obtained proof that it will actually earn you a paycheck, because from what I've seen, it mostly just condemns you to a living hell.
(Btw: every time I've tried to apply any of that YouTuber advice, misleading clickbait names or putting myself in the thumbnail, it did absolutely nothing.)
