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Comment by reggieband | Hacker News Reader

I watch a lot of YouTube and a fair amount of Twitch. Sooner or later every creator talks a bit about their anxiety working in that content creator grind.

On Twitch, taking a day off may mean losing hundreds of subscribers. Streamers are cautious about taking bathroom breaks since they can lose thousands of viewers during a short break. YouTube ruthlessly punishes creators that don't upload on a consistent schedule. I imagine TikTok and Instagram are similar.

My guess is that Kottke has been living under a similar stress for 24 years. That has got to wear a person down.

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If you're a streamer large enough to be receiving hundreds of subs a day, and so many viewers you could lose thousands during a bathroom break, you're a multi millionaire. It's hard for me to be sympathetic about how stressful their job is when they could retire comfortably at any point.

They always have staff they pay with that money. It doesn't all flow into their pockets. It's very hard to reach that scale on your own.

It seems many streamers can barely take care of themselves. With the money involved I'd imagine a large cottage industry of Agents, Marketers, Content editors, and subsidies to friends and teammates who participate in their content. Not to mention a complicated tax situations, irregular income levels, periodic industry events, etc.

Does money convert people to robots or something?

> YouTube ruthlessly punishes creators that don't upload on a consistent schedule. I imagine TikTok and Instagram are similar.

Older videos are naturally downranked because users want fresh content. The age of a post is a strong predictor of user interaction. However, it doesn't mean Youtube actively punishes less frequent creators. YouTube actually promotes a lot of old content (>1 year old) compared to other platforms. At the extreme, Instagram Stories are deleted after 24 hours forcing you to produce content daily.

Isn’t an innovation[1] of TikTok that it happily recommends old content as well as using user feedback as a stronger signal?

[1] that is, something they do and make a success of rather than some totally original idea.

They do punish you. If you fall outside of the formula you will lose a lot of traffic but posting too much pushes your older content out of the formula so posting too much means any one video won't get scale.

In modern YouTube each video is ranked individually in the algorithm. Your past videos don’t harm (or boost) your new ones.

The only overlap is where your subscribers watch the video. This gives the algorithm an idea of the audience your video is applicable to so it can push it further than a video from a channel with no subscribers

Src [PDF]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

If anything you should post as many videos as you can handle in terms of workload and quality. Don’t burn yourself out of course, but don’t hold back thinking an algorithm designed to show people videos wants less videos!

You're missing sidebar recommendations and keywords that are carried over from previous videos which are only two deep. Plus weekly, daily and monthly summing of a keyword.

Yes I have thousands of subscribers and millions of hours watched.

I have tried to post as many vidoes as possible like I'm sure many have tried. 3 a day max works better.

You’re absolutely right, I did miss them. Been using the app for a while.

In any case I’ll stop tubesplaining, sorry! Any knowledge I have is booksmarts-deep at best 2015 onwards, any recent experience is definitely going to be more informed

Oh wow 2015 is a long time ago already..

Youtube does not punish you if you are not consistent. That is simply a myth. There are plenty of very successful youtubers who only publish occasionally or irregularly.

This is the same as between making tv series of 5-6 episodes or one of 24 episodes/season or a soap opera doing 200+ episodes a year.

YT as a platform works for all kinds of producers , but as a content creator you are the in the space of high volume low quality content then yes publishing frequently is a must.

However if you are high quality low volume creator who is almost guaranteed tens of million views you could do only infrequently, however each video is going take a lot of time to produce.

It's almost as if YouTube can distinguish between the type and quality of content when choosing how to weight distribution.

(I'm sure it does, and I'd like to know more about the algorithm.)

It would be nice to know academically, however am not so sure it would benefit us as users.

YT like Search is heavily targeted for SEO, having access to the algorithm will just make it easier for exploitation , we will get even more low quality low effort content in our feeds than now. More good creators will leave the platform.

How many of them 1) always published long-form material, and 2) hit their stride/"were selected by the algorithm" in the last few years?

I would believe that what you describe is true for long-established YouTube personalities, and I can think of plenty myself, but I can think of pretty few that haven't been doing it for at least five years or so (with the exception of the woodworking space, where it seems like perhaps there's still some growth opportunities despite plenty of creators--my guess is it's because the ad revenue is way better there). I follow a lot of smaller essayists 'cause I like that sort of thing and have a friendly recommendation network to leverage; YouTube very rarely recommends me long-form content, in either Search or Suggested Videos, from somebody I've never seen before.

Those successful youtubers grew their audience publishing regularly and then switched to publishing irregularly after.

Sovietwomble has had a stable following (and even growing) for years. He doesn’t always stream, but yet he is very consistent in his timetable. He hardly loses many people when he doesn’t stream for a while. The guy never goes on holiday though, but not because he fears losing subs.

Perhaps it depends on what kind of content creator we are talking about. Is it the shock and awe / latest greatest / hype train type of content?

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