On July 13, 2020, YouTube deleted my main channel with nearly 60,000 subscribers. Fourteen years of labor and love that I spent building up a channel were gone in an instant. Since then, I’ve realized the folly of using any kind of Silicon Valley platform in order to present my work to the public.
The two biggest draws of the platform are the convenience and the user base. By the time you encounter a platform that could be useful, it already has tens of thousands—if not millions—of users. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could start sharing work that reaches those people, without having to set up your own website and painstakingly market to your intended audience?
It’s helpful that the platform exaggerates its own usefulness by implementing an algorithm to give followers and views to new users even if their content doesn’t warrant it. The honeymoon won’t last for long: soon the platform holds your followers hostage. Instead of showing followers your content, a platform like Facebook demands money from you to help “boost” your post—to those who already opted in to your work. Or how about YouTube, which refuses to notify your subscribers of a new video upload. Once the platform gets big enough, the algorithm is tweaked to maximize benefits for them, not exposure for you.
When using a platform, you’re essentially making a deal with the devil. You grant a perpetual license for your content to a corporation and submit to arbitrary and stifling rules in exchange for eyeballs, status, or fame. As long as you serve the will of the platform, the deal seems like it will have no cost, but as soon as you begin to think for yourself, or wish to create content that does not serve the prevailing agenda of the Jewish owner of the platform, you will be swiftly throttled or banned.
It’s no big deal if you get banned, because you can just take your subscribers elsewhere, right? Wrong, the platform has access to your subscriber list and will not let you contact them. When I was banned from YouTube, I had no way of contacting my 60,000 subscribers to let them know where they could find my future videos. While many of them were already familiar with my blog, half weren’t, because my videos since then have suffered a 50-60% drop in views. Perhaps they are still clicking reload on YouTube, wondering why I stopped making videos.
The platform owns your subscribers while you own content which may not even be suitable anywhere else (e.g. TikTok videos, Twitter tweets). As they say in marketing, “The money is in the list.” If you don’t have the list of people who follow you that you can contact yourself, you have nothing. Compare that to using a service instead of a platform. If my hosting company shuts me down, I will simply find another host. If my newsletter email service shuts me down (which it did in January), I will import the email list that I regularly backup onto another service. They do not take my subscribers. But Twitter? DLive? Instagram? If they ban me, I lose access to my subscribers while the platform gets to keep the users that I brought to the service. They experience all upside from me using their platforms, and yet I have to withstand all the downside. I have skin in the game, they have none.
There are several platforms I’m still on, mostly independent in nature like Gab and Telegram, but I don’t plan on signing up for any new ones. Unless the platform gives me a subscriber list of email addresses—and the only one that I know that does that is Substack—it’s not worth it, because on a long enough timeline, everyone on a platform gets suspended, censored, or banned. I must admit that my influence will progressively decline. I will never have over 40,000 people watching my video live streams again, but that also means I will not be helping a homosexual-friendly company build their business on the backs of me and my followers.
I fell for the platform scam. I made a deal with the devil to receive more attention to my work, and at the peak of my ability to spread the truth during a critical juncture of American history, I had the rug pulled out from under me. I won’t make that deal again. From this point on, I will maintain a humble blog for a ragtag group of a few thousand people and not much more.
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