If you read the last blog post (and I highly recommend you do, it speaks in detail about the state of YouTube and their standing in the world of online media production), you know that YouTube as a platform is trying to offer creators the opportunity to make different types of content (that is, livestreams, long-form video, and short-form video). What I didn’t touch on, though, is Community posts, and whether it can replace a platform like Twitter for online video creators.

What are community posts?

If you don’t spend much time on YouTube, and if you don’t use the YouTube app, you may not even know that such a feature exists.

Community posts have been a thing for a while, but they used to be one of those features that people just don’t use (ahem YouTube Stories).

This changed a while ago, though.

YouTube’s algorithm changed a few years ago (around when the pandemic started) and it started to promote community posts a lot more (and more specifically, community polls). This, as economics students will tell you, created an incentive effect and promoted the publishing of community posts and all of a sudden, people started making a lot of community posts.

Community polls became a huge part of YouTube as well. People began to ask the community’s opinion on stuff, and (I assume) the community engagement absolutely broke the YouTube algorithm.

Now, it’s impossible to think of YouTube without thinking of community posts and polls.

YouTube community posts vs Twitter

Most of the time, creators use Twitter to get feedback from their communities about their content, and also share their opinions with their communities.

Community posts, now though, achieve the same thing.

I actually think that community posts are comparable to Twitter (and may even be better than it) because:

1. Twitter is a mobile-focused app, and so are YouTube community posts. They are mainly visible and mainly used on the Twitter mobile app and the YouTube mobile app, respectively.
2. The audience for YouTube community posts (at least for this purpose) is more representative than the Twitter audience as there will be more people (who actually watch YouTube) who interact with community posts and polls, whereas the Twitter audience is just a subset of people who watch the creator on YouTube.

Is Twitter Dead?

No.

(un)Luckily Elon Musk’s investment is not going to die just yet.

Here’s why: Twitter has other uses.

Twitter is almost an independent news site, which YouTube can’t do (yet, at least). It’s a town square of some sort.

But Twitter might stop being used as a tool for surveying video-watchers. That might become the job of YouTube community posts.

This Week’s Updates

The Disappointment Gap

I started reading a book called Atomic Habits, by James Clear. In that, he says that it takes consistent effort to gain results, but there is a sort of time lag between when you start something and when you start getting results.

The results don’t scale linearly with effort, but at some point, the results overtake the effort. Before you reach this point, though, you have to deal with something called the Disappointment Gap: a place where you don’t feel like you’re getting enough result for your effort.

Purple Cow

If you’re walking around the road, and you see a cow, you won’t stop. It’s just normal. It’s just status quo.

If you see a purple cow, though, you’ll stop. You’ll pay attention, because it is unique and unseen.

To get an audience in an online world, you should be the purple cow.

Something I need to work on.

Photo Diary

Thanks for reading.