Sargon Should Quit Youtube: Success Entails Starting Your Own Platform.

this video is neither cheerleading for
one side nor the other the purpose of this video is not to celebrate sargon of akkad and it's also not to condemn sargon of akkad it's neither to justify YouTube's unpredictable censorship policies nor is it to condemn them this is an occasion for all YouTube creators to wake up and be reminded that one YouTube is just a website and to success on YouTube by definition means quitting YouTube means moving off of YouTube ok very briefly I'm going to explain to you what I mean about 10 years ago you might have known some of these people there were people who were just like swept up in their success on Facebook they had a Facebook group or a Facebook page and maybe it got featured in the local newspaper or the local radio station or something or sometimes even a big TV station like CNN said oh there's a there's a new Facebook page for fans of the original pac-man video game and they got 1 million people coming to this Facebook pitch I don't know if any of those Facebook people ever said to you that they were going to quit their job and do Facebook full-time the wait today it's completely normal for people to say they're gonna quit their job and do YouTube full-time but you might have known some people 10 years ago who were so swept up in the success of a Facebook page or a facebook project that they sort of lost sight of the fact that Facebook is just a website and whatever their project was on Facebook to really be successful okay now you've got this attention now you've got a million people interested or a thousand people interest you have to take the next step to get off Facebook whether that's on to your own website starting your own business or somehow or another getting out into the real world right so like I knew people I guess ten years ago rounding off new people doing like political activism of different kinds and they would get really caught up in the success sometimes of like a single image like a single meme or poster or something they post on the Internet and it's like dude okay if this is success then you got to think about next steps you can't get caught up in this website about five years ago maybe seven years ago now this also happened with tumblr briefly people would have like a fantastically successful tumblr page which again it might have been built on the success of like one image one mean that people loved or something and it's like dude tumblr is not your career and whatever it is you're trying to accomplish whether it's you know something as simple as like a video game fan club or you know a movie review channel or something or if it's something more like political activism or you know news commentary commentary on current events or something you've got to think about the next step because like by definition no matter how much success you have within that platform if you can't step off of that platform into something real er into real life into the real world that success is a failure okay today in the year 2020 that's easy to see with those other websites I just mentioned right like the greatest level of success you can possibly attain on Facebook is basically a failure it's still meaningless it doesn't mean anything and any point like that had nothing to do with you right like your merit or your video I'm the on the administrator of one of the biggest discussion groups for vegans in Japan on Facebook I think it's the second biggest for vegans in Japan means nothing I mean like well I have the ability to kick people out of that group I guess like well if I want to go mad with power and feeling like I'm successful and it had nothing to do with me like I used to be studying Japanese and not anymore and a whole lot of people signed up for that for all I know maybe it was featured in the local newspaper or something maybe you so many people signed up to join that group for some wacky reason like that I don't know and I don't care ok we're at a stage right now in 2020 where that delusion that YouTube is something much more than Facebook or tumblr or Twitter people haven't quite broken out of it yet we just heard sargon of akkad say that he feels he should be treated better by YouTube because he got a total of something like 50 billion views you know whether or not that number is correct whether it is 50 million or 500 million or 5 billion or 50 billion you get to define what is success relative to your category what you're trying to entertain you might be doing something that's a real niche market and there only are a few thousand viewers you can possibly reach like the maximum size of the audience what you do might be pretty small or it might be 10 million it might be some proximate number like this that's attainable once you've attained that think about the next steps because there's no way to succeed here within YouTube with this so-called fame that's just making money for Google corporation just making money for YouTube corporation where you take on none of the risk you take on none of the responsibility you also get none of the money and you don't accomplish anything in the real world right like I mean think about the website read it whatever the topic is you're dressed in maybe you want to talk about politics maybe you want to do movie reviews I'll just stick to those two examples okay it doesn't matter how successful you are doing commentary on reddit you might be you'd have to imagine the type of personality would be like that so if you like the person who is obsessed with their Facebook page there every time they post something on reddit they get 1,000 thumbs up they get 10,000 thumbs up it's not even a thumb on right it's an arrow right whatever they're posting these things maybe they have their own reddit discussion forum they're all they're all full you know excitement about how great this is posting already if that's your friend you've saved them look if you're serious about this kind of right now you want to write film criticism you want to do political commentary okay you have to think about getting out of Reddit and doing this on paper publishing a magazine or hey baby steps how about you start your own website that you know does what reddit does but for you on your rules on your terms and where you're paying the bills you're ultimately paying for the electricity that makes that website run right you're taking the risks you know even an issue and it'd that that was a huge part of his channels growth he didn't rely on reddit he didn't rely on YouTube he set up his own websites plural with his own discussion forums of course he later ran that into the ground and deleted it all so the story but like it's remarkable how rare it is for people to step away from depending on this kind of corporate platform that's being provided for you to just try to start your own platform right and like some of you guys might think that there's like a huge risk involved in printing something on paper not really so like instead of spending your time writing these articles that go on reddit what about you have your own website with your own discussion forum you're doing the writing and periodically you're gathering it together even if you just is self-published books on Amazon or something there are ways you can step it up and make your efforts count in the real world the technology were relying on here on YouTube it has existed for at least 20 years YouTube itself is 15 years old this website and the technology exists at least five years before that right this is 20 year old technology can anyone remember PewDiePie complaining that he was going to delete his channel I forget this a couple years ago he was he was angry at YouTube for suppressing his channel for not promoting his channel where they used to he was getting fewer views he had these complaints about the way YouTube was managed editorial decisions and so on and he said he was gonna delete his channel and quit YouTube now he later said that was a joke that he didn't mean it seriously nevertheless he was come cleaning about what he didn't like what you do don't you think PewDiePie could organize a conference call with some computer programmers in Silicon Valley and create his own website where he directly upload some videos like do you want it like estimate the budget for that at this point like there are so many website providing services there's some of us you can get your own domain and you can start uploading your own videos to your own platforms on your own terms and again have your own comment section have your own discussion forum so if you're somebody like Sargon of a cat and you feel accomplished because you hit fifty billion views in total right sure it's a market economy but for some of you people if you have a YouTube channel that's about knitting or about some very specific category within politics or something all right it might be you have five million views you say okay I've done everything YouTube can do for me in the same way that someone who's successful as a writer on reddit still has to become a real writer if you're successful as a filmmaker on YouTube you still have to become a real filmmaker if you're successful doing political commentary on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr you still have to think about the next steps to being successful doing political analysis and political commentary in the real world and you know the Internet will still be part of that you may still have a website you may you may have a charity that receives donations you may form a political action committee it's an American term you may start a foundation or a charity or you know you may register it and make it real in the real world in some sense and it may still be that ninety percent of what you do happens over the Internet you know even when you publish something on paper it might be ten percent of the people by the book on paper and ninety percent of them get it as a PDF in the internet that kind of thing is common now I'm not here saying the internet by definition is less Rijo right some of as it is I mean if your if your aspiration is to get out in the real world to make a political difference through activism of some kind what ever it is if you want to make the world a different place by opening a restaurant of your own or by publishing a book of restaurant criticism maybe you publish annually you collect together your reviews of all the best and worst restaurants in the city you live in you want that book to exist on paper and other people will get it as an app for their mobile phone or whatever okay look it's a good example at some point if you're serious about doing restaurant reviews you have to stop submitting them to yelp.com stop submitting your restaurant reviews to Google Maps you know there are all these corporations that will take your hard work and they'll make money out of it for free at some point you have to recognize YouTube is just a website and the only way to win is to walk away try to achieve something outside of that website and very often that's gonna involve creating a website of your own creating a so-called ecosystem of your own you're gonna stop being a free rider on the you know the platform that YouTube created for you or the platform that Facebook created for you right which makes it easy for hobbyists makes it easy for people like me but ultimately it's limiting its it's like a skin that you have to shed like a snake molting its skin as soon as you hit that point whatever it is that defined success for you success in nexor ibly requires you to quit YouTube