Returning to My Roots

I've been thinking a lot about the video content on the channel lately. I've had quite a few duds over the last few weeks and I've been trying to figure out why. I don't really care about a dud every once in a while, that's going to happen, but it has been something like 4 out of the last 5 have been fairly low ranked.

I don't do this to get rich or to become the next Mr. Beast or anything, but as I've talked about before in blog posts, it doesn't feel all that great when your videos that you put effort into flop. 

So, I've been thinking about why the number of turds (technical term) I've been putting out has increased and I think I've figured it out. Over the last month or so, I've gotten out of the habit of doing videos that *I* want to do. Oh, there have been a few that I've done for fun, but it feels like I've been forcing it for a while now. Some videos I've done have just not been fun to make and that probably comes across in the videos themselves. Add on top of that, it's a pain to edit a video you don't really like or care for. 

And it's not as if anyone is forcing these topics upon me. These topics were ones I had on my list for a long time, but thought would do well. For example, the video I did about the most dangerous Linux commands was one I had planned for almost a year. And it took a ton of time to record since each command ate a VM. That video just didn't do as well as I thought it would (not a complete failure, but not as high up as I expected). Some of that has, probably, to do with false expectations on my part. Some of it might be YouTube not caring for the title or the thumbnail. Whatever it is, I still feel like it was something wrong with the video. I can't really put my finger on why, to be honest. And there have been several others lately that have just kind of felt, well, meh. 

So, instead of writing here about "woe is me" and "oh man views are down", I'm going to do something about it. I'm returning to my roots a bit. Ricing and window manager videos will come back to the channel. Some specific stuff about Polybar, rofi, dmenu (and some other suckless tools) will show up on the channel. I know a lot of people like the distro reviews/first looks, but I've gotten away from those, so those will come back in some form or fashion as well. I don't want to do the traditional YouTuber thing with the distros, that's boring for me even if they are popular, so I need to think about how I can make that an entertaining thing for me to do. 

Apps are where I'm going to hit a snag, because some app videos do really well, others (like the news reader app video I did recently) bomb. I don't want to stop doing them, though, so I'll keep those going. Some will hit, some will miss, and that's okay. Those usually do well in the long term no matter what anyways. 

I also want to do more terminal stuff. Some scripting maybe, some terminal apps, things like that. It has been a long while since I did that kind of stuff on the channel and I want to return to it.

Finally, I'm going to do some medium-term reviews. Things like spending a week in Qtile which I'm going to do. Spend a week in BSPWM or Xmonad, things like that. Same with some distros. Less effort than the long-term reviews, but not the really low effort that some YouTubers do.

I'm also thinking about upping the quality of the videos. I still don't script my videos (and I never will since I suck at it), but some better editing and better use of b-roll I think will make things seem a little more put together while keeping the tone of the videos that I'm known for.

So those are just some thoughts on some changes that I want to do. I'll probably keep this blog post as a Patreon exclusive, but I've not decided on that yet.

Thoughts?

Matt