Numbers on the Screen

December 23, 2025

Before I had this website here on balckwell.online, I posted my essays to Substack for about two years. I’m not sure how exactly I heard about it at first, but I had this vague sense that it was the best place to get your writing seen online, and possibly get paid for it.

Around the same time, I created a podcast called Balckwell’s Books, which was also hosted on Substack, but which primarily found an “audience” on Youtube. I kept that up for about a year before I burned myself out on the whole thing.

Through these experiences, I gained essential insight into the nature of these platforms. To put it plainly, they turned my brain into mush. Which is why I disavowed the online content racket entirely and sequestered myself on this website that no one can ever find. I have spent a good deal of time since investigating what exactly happened to me, and what aspects of these platforms cause the infinite churn that destroys the resolve of so many like me (and equally destroys the integrity of (most of) those who “succeed.”)

Here’s the truth of the matter: Youtube is a television and Substack is a magazine. On television, you could find a lot of trash, both fictional and non-fictional, and occasionally some interesting programming. Magazines were 50% advertising and 40% page filler; I am leaving 10% open for the possibility of some interesting writing. I was never a huge magazine reader, outside of Nintendo Power when I was in seventh grade, but I’m sure there were some people trying out there.

How did interesting programming end up on television sometimes? Well, the goal of television studios was to get everyone they possibly could to watch television. There are shows that almost everyone will watch, like game shows or the news, but then there are shows that a certain segment of people will ignore, such as soap operas or police procedurals. The goal was to get those people who “don’t watch television” to watch television, and the only way to do that was to make interesting programming — shows that weren’t like the rest of what was on TV.

So, you had to have someone out there looking for those kinds of TV shows, choosing pilots based on intuition and random whims. Shows that couldn’t be mega-hits might still get a chance; most of the time they would fail, but they might get a season or two, which is better than nothing.

While TV was primarily numbers-driven, there was this weird little humanistic element operating in the margins, which resulted in most of the TV shows that people consider “the greats.” The prestige garnered from these TV shows bolstered television as a whole, giving people a reason to maintain their cable subscriptions even when most of the programming being pumped out was total trash. So, it was good for the numbers overall, but not in the kind of direct way that could necessarily be seen on a spreadsheet.

Youtube, of course, doesn’t have any human element involved in the choice of programming. Obviously, anyone can upload anything they want to Youtube (within reason), but the problem lies in gaining access to the audience. Most people find Youtube videos when they show up on their homepage, and what determines whether they show up there is a computer program. This computer program is very complicated and can be adjusted by human hands, but essentially all it can use to make judgments are numbers. It has a lot of numbers to look at — more than any human person could shake a stick at — but the fact remains that its “decisions” will always be purely quantitative, rather than qualitative.

Every creator on Youtube is given direct access to many of the numbers being used for these calculations. This is a bit of a trick, because these numbers themselves are often determined by whether the above-mentioned computer program has decided to push their videos onto people’s homepages, and since this involves calculations beyond the human ken, the result appears to be complete randomness. Whether a video does well or poorly, whether it “blows up” to a larger audience or stays within one’s subscriber base, or whether it is even shown to subscribers to one’s channel or not, seems to be up to blind fate. But at the same time, the presence of these numbers gives one the illusion of control; a man begins to think that if only he analyzes the numbers closely enough, he can change his destiny…

No matter how much you tell yourself you don’t care about the numbers, chances are that these numbers will affect you psychologically. This can be the case even if one does not visit the “Analytics” page, with all its charts and graphs. The truth is that the most important numbers are front-and-centre all the time, below every single video you watch. The view count below a video’s title is perhaps more important than the video’s title or thumbnail itself; it subliminally determines your expectation of the video. Clicking on a video with 320K views and a video with 765 views are entirely different experiences. When you see a video with a low view count, you are immediately skeptical; you will only click on it with the feeling of, “Well, I guess I’ll give this a chance.” A video with a high view count has the appearance of reliability; clearly, there must be something to this, if so many people decided to watch it.

Intellectually, you understand that the stuff of these videos might be exactly the same. The low view count video might be by a new creator who hasn’t got off the ground, or it might be about a niche subject that not many people care about. The high view count video might be shallow and stupid, but posted by someone who has grinded out a career by covering popular topics. There’s no way to actually know until you watch it. However, you think you know, even if you don’t think you think you know, based on your subliminal reaction to the numbers on the screen.

Thus, we are all playing the game of Youtube. And this game dis-incentivizes creating a channel where you post videos that might not be popular. Because, to be perfectly honest, it’s kind of embarrassing to post video after video that get around a hundred views. You feel like a bit of an idiot, because by posting on the platform itself you are signalling yourself as a participant in the game, and everyone can see that you are losing. And you start to think, well, perhaps I should spend a little more time coming up with catchy titles, or creating flashy thumbnails (despite having no eye for visual design), but once you do this you have made an even more fatal mistake: because now you are not only losing, which could generously be chalked down to a lack of interest, but you are losing while trying, which is the worst look of all.

I’ve been focusing on Youtube because it is the most well-understood and well-viewed algorithmic platform online for people who are trying, as opposed to the more sloppy short-form video platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. A lot of people try to build careers on Youtube while believing themselves to be artists or critics, rather than mere “influencers,” which doesn’t seem to be the case on those other platforms. Probably the nearest analogy is something like Substack.

Substack works quite a bit differently than Youtube in certain ways, because of its integration with the e-mail newsletter format and its more robust networking features, but suffers from many of the same problems. Since Substack added a main feed and a Twitter-like microblogging feature, it has combined the worst of the worlds of Youtube, where title and thumbnail are king, with Twitter or Bluesky, where making pithy jokes and controversial statements is the key to success. Once these features took over, I found it embarrassing to be on Substack, solely because of the company I was keeping. I felt like my website was inherently sullied by its presence on the platform, even if I was trying my best to maintain my personal integrity. In the end, none of these features were even helping me find an audience, so I left.

What motivates people like me and most of the creators I enjoy to use these platforms is not fame, prestige, or even buckets of money, but what these things afford you: time. Because if you can make money through these platforms, or some secondary service such as Patreon, then you no longer need to spend 40 hours a week doing something else in order to live, and can instead focus all your efforts on your Works. The dream is the Lifestyle, where one can support one’s self using only one’s talent and brilliant insights.

The great irony is that all the niggling toil that is involved in maintaining an audience — social media presence, patreon-exclusive bonuses, “catering” (pandering) to your audience (or a larger potential audience) in terms of topics and style — is more than a full-time job in itself, and usually gets in the way of whatever you were passionate about doing or conveying in the first place. And this is what leads even successful creators to burn out, either slowly withering away or destroying themselves in an explosion of online drama.

And yet, despite this knowledge, the dream of the Lifestyle still beckons me at times. I know that everything I’ve written about above, combined with my exclusive interest in old books no one reads, combined with my antipathy toward video editing and graphic design, means that internet success is beyond my grasp. And I know that it would not make me happy, but likely more miserable than ever! But we all know better than to think that such self-knowledge would prevent ceaseless yearning for long-dead dreams…

I’ve grown, over the course of this year, more and more infatuated with the spirit of the amateur. I’ve spent too long chasing vague ideas of success: impossible dreams of making money through my writing or criticism. Youtube and Substack have poisoned our minds with the idea that everyone should be able to make money simply by producing good work, or expressing their passion to like-minded individuals. This simply isn’t the case! And it never has been! The core of the amateur spirit is accepting this, and not letting it get in your way. Let’s be real: receiving money for doing something makes it suck. That’s why jobs suck; it’s because you get money to do them. Many people think it’s the other way around, but they’ve got it all backwards. Working for free — on one’s own initiative, of course — is the greatest pleasure known to mankind. Toiling away at an endeavour for no particular reason at all, and with no extrinsic reward in sight — what could be better? This is what we live for!

I’ll write until I die — heck, I might even write myself to death — and I’ll do it regardless of my financial situation or my likelihood of being read and adored by millions of fools. It’s the terrible thing about being a writer that it involves readers at all; if I was a guy who liked cars, I could just putter away on my cars on the weekend, and no one else would have to be involved. But being a writer, I’ve got to find people to read what I’ve written. And once I’ve found one person, I want two, and so on and so on. It takes conscious effort to say, enough is enough! And once I’ve said it, I’ve got to keep saying it, over and over again, lest I forget myself and find I’ve started dreaming again of the Lifestyle, and of legions of adoring readers…