I'm Sick of Algorithms

By Tadas Petra

Over the past couple of years, I have been deeply studying the algorithms and how to grow social media accounts (specifically YouTube and Twitter). By no means do I think I know it all, but I believe I understand what it takes to have your content “do well”.

Yet I can’t bring myself to do it.

Who am I

For a little bit of context, my name is Tadas Petra, and I am a Flutter Developer who started on YouTube making Flutter tutorials. Then I started posting Flutter tips and memes on Twitter. My YouTube channel has reached over 25,000 subscribers, and my Twitter account over 18,000.

But about a year ago, I wanted to try out some new content types, learn editing, and just overall become better at content creation. I tried to experiment with topics that weren’t necessarily strictly tutorials, and I tried diving into other topics that weren’t directly Flutter-related. Since this content wasn’t what my audience was built on, that meant I needed to either:

  1. Make content that appeases the algorithm so it gets spread
  2. Tie the content together with Flutter

My Journey

Since this was a time of exploration, I went with option #1.

I learned about how important CTR is, and different editing techniques and tricks to keep engagement at a consistent pace for all the videos, and different tactics to have your AVD be as long as possible.

Some of these things worked great; for example, I have a much longer view duration now, and I think my videos are edited significantly better. Although my CTR is not where I would want it to be, I think my thumbnails are overall more clickable than before. All this stuff works, but there’s only one problem.

I hate how it controls every part of the process.

I know exactly the type of videos and tweets that I need to make to generate a lot of views. For those interested, here are the secrets.

Viral Twitter Post Ideas

Tweet with Impressions 

Viral Flutter YouTube Video Ideas

Before we move forward, I need to say that I don’t have a problem with other people posting this stuff. If this is something that you enjoy doing, then all the power to you. Some of these examples I can actually see being helpful to beginners.

I’m Stuck

My point here is that I just can’t do it.

I don’t find joy in making this type of content. I love learning.

When I started YouTube, I was learning all about Flutter, and I wanted to share the things I was learning. But then I got to a point where I became a GDE and have a relatively high level of understanding of Flutter.

Now, there are definitely a lot of topics still left for me to learn and improve, and by no means am I saying I am even close to being one of the best Flutter developers. I am just saying that most of the audience is not as interested in “Most Efficient JSON Serialization in Flutter”, and making that type of video doesn’t necessarily excite me.

Going forward

Where is this all going?

For the time being, I am going to try to care less about the algorithms. I want to get back to a point where I look forward to creating content every day.

I took a look back at some of my favorite videos that I’ve ever created, and it was definitely the Deep Dive series, where I looked into the inner workings of how Flutter works, and the Flutter Updates, where I tried to make sense of all the new stuff coming out.

I plan to do the same Deep Dives into different programming-related things. Some quick examples are How the Internet Works, What is WebRTC, or even more general like how does computer vision work? There will probably be topics that relate to Flutter as well, since it’s the main thing I use for development. I want to still put out the Flutter update videos and cover topics like what Metal is and why Flutter transitioned to it for iOS.

I’m excited for this new journey, but don’t hold me to it in case I come running back to these algorithm tactics.

Side Note

Throughout this article, I used the word “algorithms”, but through my learning about the “algorithms”, that word can be replaced with “audience”.

Having better thumbnails and more engaging videos makes the audience watch your content more. So this experiment could definitely backfire, but I hypothesize that there is an overlap of content that I enjoy making and content that the audience will still enjoy.