On Control, Agency, and No Longer Being a "YouTuber"
Sometimes realizations come in places that should be expected, but you always write off. Like the previous piece I was writing just an hour ago. While most of my writing here involves me writing about the questions that plague my mind with few answers, every once in a green moon I walk away from writing only to realize I do, in fact, already have the answer by nature of asking the question.
I’ve experimented both publicly and privately with making “low-effort” videos - videos filmed on lo-fi equipment with minimal editing. Vlogs, discussions, unboxings, and so on. Technically I’ve done this for most of my career (until recent years) - but the experiments are more of a deliberate effort to go back for the sake of it, rather than just working from a place of limited resources.
In many ways, I’ve found this experience rather freeing. Possibly a crucial step in coming back to content-making as my job after a deep, dark burnout, this process allowed me to get back to making videos without any expectations, standards, weight on my shoulders. It felt freeing.
But not long after (and especially after resuming my normal, high-effort video work) the feeling of freedom succumbed to a feeling of pointlessness. Why bother doing this? What’s the point of making low-effort videos on purpose? If chasing a trend, I’m late to it already. If expecting extra views, I put them on their own channel (Final Draft) so I’m operating from a disadvantage. If hoping to reinvent myself, I found myself longing for the creativity and artistry that required the other tools and sense of effort I had. Unfortunately, that dissonance resulted in me not posting any more of these casual videos in the new year. I want to get back to it, but I needed to establish my why.
That feeling of freedom, of not being beholden to my existing role or expectations or formats or formulas, packaging, algorithm optimizing - any of it - came down to one simple value: Control.
When deliberately making worse videos with lower effort and no packaging that aren’t algorithmically-optimized, I’m not being more “authentic” (despite what the zoomers might try to convince you of). If I’m a creative, an artist, someone who enjoys the act of making and creating and bringing my vision into this world, how am I being my authentic self if I’m just throwing that all away to intentionally make a worse video? It’s not freeing because I’m tired of making things, of expressing myself or being creative - because I’m not tired of any of those things.
This was a freeing experience because I was in control. By breaking away from the pressure of my supposed status, the expectations of an established channel, and the packaging demands of an algorithmically-manipulated website, and instead just making whatever I felt like, I was in control of the full process and experience. Things were on my terms. I may not get to control whom my videos are shown to and who clicks on it - nor how they might feel about it or respond to it - but I get to control how I envision it, how I make it, how I finish it, and how I present it to potential viewers.
Actually, I lied a bit. While it’s true that I cannot control how YouTube surfaces my videos (or to whom) I do exercise some degree of control over that part of the chain by way of deliberately tanking videos, in a way. By putting these videos on a new undiscovered channel rather than an established one, I’m both shaking off the expectations of whatever channel I would have posted to (EposVox for “main” or tech talk, or analog_dreams for my original “art channel” that I’ve since left the niche I built a following for) and I’m also actively choosing to reach a smaller audience. Posting a video without packaging and without an established audience is controlling (in a way) who sees it, kind of filtering the possible negative feedback from those with expectations based on where I might have otherwise put the video. Plus, when the video inevitably fails to get off the ground views-wise, that’s an assumed predictable outcome that I “know will happen” and thus am not bothered by. For videos that are more raw or exposing vulnerabilities, in a way this is an act of self-preservation.
The more closely I’ve looked at these feelings, the more that element of control has felt like the “real” reason for things all along. Back to the original experiment, the reason it felt easier to get back to video making through these thumbnail-less, crappy quality videos isn’t because I was “going back to my roots” or because it was lower friction (maybe that was a part of it, though!) - it’s because I felt in control of the process and outcome and thus it was a safer path.
I can exercise that control over my work without making low-effort vlogs. It starts with simply controlling the publishing.
I’ve preached the importance and value of the POSSE strategy from IndieWeb: Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This provides inherent benefits of ownership and security by having cited ownership over your content and you have a place for potential viewers, visitors, listeners, etc. to come back to, should something happen to the corporate platform you post on (or your account with them). This strategy both reduces risk and increases the value of engagement between your work and whomever consumes it - or just yourself and your friends online. There’s no middleman and no corporation (or tech bro) dictating the means by which you can communicate or interact.
The benefits of using this strategy could seriously help my mindset and stressors here. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that I’ve been so slow to fully embrace it.
I’ve tried, or at least I tell myself that. I’ve been uploading my early-finished videos to a PeerTube instance and Proton Drive and posting them to the forums for paid subscribers to enjoy without YouTube. For our Dual Comm Podcast Patreon subscribers, I also upload our Patreon-exclusive talks to PeerTube, Proton Drive in both video and audio-only form, alongside the unlisted YouTube video upload. I try to maintain a portfolio, links site, a bunch of blogs - but my habits have not kept up. I don’t post every video to my own sites, I often don’t post to them first, and I still have an over-reliance on corporate platforms for much of my output. (YouTube for video, Podbean for audio, Twitch/YouTube for live, BlueSky - and Mastodon, which isn’t corporate but I also enjoy using less - for random thoughts and ideas that really should be blog-first, etc.)
I can’t promise that I’ll switch everything right away, but habits are best built one step at a time.
So here’s my promise: A POSSE approach for my videos
I’m taking a forums-first approach starting today. My default outlet for video content will be through the DemoDisc.zone forums (videos hosted via PeerTube) big or small. For my normal video output, this lends a few advantages:
- The usual/already-discussed: No algorithm, no need for fancy packaging, direct structured interactions, a platform I have ownership and control over
- Functioning search
- The ability for me to continue updating and providing context around the video (via editing the post or additional discussions)
- The ability to not just post videos, but include images, audio, etc. alongside it (content agnostic)
- I control where the videos are, what they’re shown next to (an increasing concern on any corporate website), and nothing is hidden or deprioritized or just arbitrarily not shown to people on site who are interested
- No ads - financing is purely handled by the on-site subscriptions or Patreon
Through this, the freedom I felt posting lazy videos to Final Draft can be felt with anything I make. Any video, art piece, written thoughts (already felt on this blog anyway), etc.
I can post videos to viewers even earlier on the forums than YouTube - basically as soon as they’re ready - without having to worry about having the perfect title and thumbnail ready.
I can post short clips (without making a capital-s Short), random videos, etc. without feeling like I have to meet a certain bar of quality or expectations for a given channel. I can “just post things” again like I used to, when I want to share.
I can post things that can get me into trouble on YouTube - things that include copyrighted music or other material, or things like showing you how to download YouTube videos.
There’s a million reasons to do this, and very few reasons not to. The only one I can think of is an old one, and not one I’ve believed in in a long time: The idea that I could be sacrificing views on YouTube. This is a bit of a paradox. Either it’s successful enough that moving the views and users off of YouTube onto my own site would be both rewarding and lucrative enough to make up the difference or it’s not a significant enough audience to have any impact.
The Linus Tech Tips team previously had to reconcile with this when going in on a private video platform, then making their own with Floatplane - and similarly found that there was no meaningful impact on their YouTube viewership, meanwhile the payoff made massive differences in LMG’s business.
Obviously videos that meet the invisible bar of quality, standards, relevance, or “worth it” will still make it to YouTube. Those videos will get packaging appropriate for the platform they go on. Reviews and sponsored videos with embargo restrictions will be withheld until the allowed time and published on both YouTube and my own site simultaneously. But otherwise forums first.
Not to sound overly-pretentious, but this represents a shift in how I (publicly) think of myself as a “YouTuber” to being an artist or creator on its own.
As I’ve thought about it, I have come to realize that a lot of my identity struggles during he peak of my burnout in 2024-2025 boil down to not being able to see myself as an artist or writer or whatever given that everything I do is seen and filtered through the lens of my specific YouTube channels and their expectations.
Through this one little shift, I can fix that. I already feel better about it just writing this down, and I haven’t even done anything yet. I know few people will actually show up, but I feel in charge of my future this way.
The last detail will be to clean up the connective tissue between my various websites. As it stands, the eposvox.com site, analogdreams.zip blog (which this is on) and the DemoDisc.zone forums are all very distinctly different sites, with little syncing them up. This is mostly by design; they are different tools for different jobs after all, however I do believe stronger emphasis needs made on what place is for which purpose and more easily navigating between them.
As an example, if you go to my namesake site eposvox.com it should be abundantly obvious to go to the forums to view my videos (perhaps with some unifying tag on the forums that can be easily linked to). ((Side note for myself: Perhaps look into if an RSS feed can be made from a specific tag on the forums for those who wish to follow that way.))
Overall, I do not want the technical details to matter or even be the subject of much thought beyond this. When I look back on my work in another 10 years, I will not care about the intricacies of my PeerTube hosting setup, the nuance of cross-linking everything together. Ideally, this should all be invisible to the viewer and passerby; and ideally I can look back on all this and just see a body of work of my own in my own place I built for myself, and be proud of that.
I think that a video on the forums, with accompanying text and images and so on - regardless of whether it’s a YouTube embed or PeerTube upload or direct download - should feel like a natural way of looking at and discussing my work, and all the little details won’t matter. We’ll see.
The timing is poor as I have just finished a months-long project and already posted the video about it; but I do look forward to my next video creation and posting it specifically to my own site first, with no YouTube nonsense attached and then feeling less stressed and stretched and flustered by the YouTube packaging once it’s a secondary objective. If any of this sounds interesting to you, go make a free account on the forums and chat with us - or considering subscribing to help support my (very varied) work!
//Thanks for everything.