Booktube: The Reckoning
In February, a small electrical fire started in the attic of my house, destroying our guest bathroom and fully disrupting all of our plans for the year. Everyone was okay, thankfully, but it was an extremely stressful time dealing with insurance and contractors (both of whom turned out to be entirely incompetent). We were told restoration would take three to four months however when all was said and done, we were in a rental house for eight months. During that time, I nuked my YouTube channel. I privated most of the videos and removed myself from all the booktube discords I was in. My life needed simplifying and abandoning booktube was a quick and easy solution.
Since then, I’ve wrestled with the question: What Do I Do With A Defunct Booktube Channel?
In theory, it’s as easy as flipping all of my videos’ visibility back to public. This is complicated by the fact that 1) Booktube had stopped be fun for a while before the fire 2) I think YouTube is Actually Evil.
I started my channel when I was a bookseller and had a lot of spare time. Then I got promoted to store manager and it instantly made keeping up with booktube nearly impossible. I tried my best though because I had made friends and I truly enjoy talking about books with people (enough to want to do it for my day job and as a hobby). However, video production kept eating into my writing time and I was increasingly feeling the stress of the dreaded YouTube algorithm.
It’s pretty hard to avoid how much YouTube wants you to gamify your experience as a creator. Every time you open Youtube Studio, it’s giving you stats and letting you know how your recent video is doing compared to other videos. Whether you want it to or not, it worms into your brain and you start thinking about doing videos that you think will perform better rather than what you really want to talk about. Or you start to push yourself to make videos more often so that you’re driving the algorithm by having more content out there. It’s a very slow burn, insidious inception that happens. So after a little over a year of fighting that losing battle, I was burnt out.
On top of all that, deep down in my heart, I think YouTube is Actually Evil. I had long held the belief that any platform functioning off of advertising and an engagement focused algorithm is dangerous. Then I read a book called The Chaos Machine, which talks about how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm radicalizes people and has led to real world harm. I felt uncomfortable participating in that ecosystem even though in my little corner of Youtube, the main thing being radicalized is one’s opinion of Brandon Sanderson.
One of the lesser things I found annoying was that YouTube can put ads on any of my videos that are doing well even when I have not earned the right to make money off of advertising myself. That feels dishonest to me.
Having said all that, two things that kept me wanting to use the YouTube platform. The first is that it’s hard to beat YouTube in terms of free video storage that’s easy to share widely. The second is the discoverability aspect of YouTube which works better than maybe any other platform (when it’s not busy turning people into Nazis).
So I’ve landed on a compromise. I’m still going upload videos to YouTube and I’m going to start making my old videos public again. But I’m going to turn the comments off and link to my personal website, where I will post the video along with any extra thoughts or commentary and people will be free to comment there. My guess is that I will get far fewer comments this way and the engagement will be much less on Youtube so it will hurt my discoverability. Still, I think it’s worth it. I hate that in order to respond to comments I have to log into Youtube Studio and see all of those mind-warping metrics. And I hate that Youtube is the primary beneficiary of anybody engaging with my videos. I would much rather have that engagement on my website.
I would like to use YouTube as a tool to continue finding cool people to talk with about books without that community being dependent on a platform that I fundamentally think is bad. I know my channel is just a tiny drop in the massive bucket of the YouTube ecosystem, but I do hope that I can provide an example of how to utilize the positive aspects of YouTube (hosting) while not surrendering to the mighty algorithm.
As far as channel plans, I don’t really intend to pick up where I left off, posting weekly videos. That’s just not sustainable for me. However, I do plan to at least post a Best of 2024 video and start doing reading/writing sprints again.
Thank you to everyone who has ever watched any of my videos and thank you to the booktube community at large, which made me feel so welcome.
As always, remember liking things is cool. Spend more time with stuff you like.
