Starting about 3 months ago, I have been attempting to be a disciplined YouTuber for the first time since joining in 2006. Here's my channel. <a href="https://youtube.com/@patdel">https://youtube.com/@patdel</a><p>Sorry in advance for being long-winded here, I have been thinking about this a lot:<p>I have another channel where I sporadically posted life videos over time, one of which has over 250,000 views.<p>What I notice from transitioning over to actually attempting to create quality opinion pieces / reporting is that it takes a massive amount of thinking/resources. So if you have little to no subscribers, if you want a 500 view video, you probably have to put 20-40 hours in, at least for technical content, and it needs to be somewhat topical.<p>If you listen to a lot of the really high-end YouTubers on podcasts, they are insistent that the algorithm really doesn't matter as much as the video quality.<p>Starting out, YouTube is very conservative about sharing a video internally on its own platform, because they don't know whether your video sucks. You can get them to accelerate that sharing process by using other networks, Twitter, message to friends, etc., but ultimately if you don't show a super high average watch time, your individual video will not blow up.<p>So that's the difficulty as an individual creator, particularly just starting out - you have a huge hill to climb. I notice smaller individual creators, in the 10k or so subscriber range, hack this by just creating new content constantly on a weekly basis. I struggle with this because I believe a lot of that content is largely garbage, and I know that if I were to do that, it would likely also be absolute garbage.<p>Now contrast this to news media outlets, who have been doing this for decades - they know how to pump out super high quality stuff on a daily or nightly basis, they have paid teams, studio set ups, editors, the capability to buy footage, etc.<p>So basically, "the algorithm doesn't matter bro, it's about quality content," is true, but at the same time, the algorithm really does matter, because YouTube constantly needs to pump out new content, and the best new content, or consistent new content is from professional studios, because for them to put in 20-40 hours of work on a video on a daily basis is already their bread and butter.<p>Does that make sense? Or am I off base here?<p>Anyway I think the only way to combat it is the same as with any other social media site - you have to actively curate your subscriptions to the content you want. On YouTube this often means being super aggressive and saying, "don't show me content fro this channel," not just disliking a video. I believe YouTube is very aggressive about showing you content that your frontal lobe might not want to see, but it knows your amygdala really wants to see, YouTube doesn't really listen to your recommendation input very closely.