A few years ago, I met a YouTuber who quit.
She spent hours crafting videos. Good ones. You could see the effort. The lighting, the edits, the scripts.
But the engagement never came.
Meanwhile, others with lower quality, less effort, more views.
She felt the system rewarded the wrong people. So she stopped.
I saw it differently.
Maybe people weren’t looking for that level of polish. Maybe they wanted consistency. Maybe she could have optimized her workflow. Outsourced some tasks. If it was serious work, treat it seriously. If it was a hobby, make five videos instead of ten.
But here’s what I really noticed.
We’re all competing with the entire internet.
LinkedIn? Same story. Premium AI tools scraping viral posts. Bulk content generators. Engagement pods where people trade likes like currency. I saw it in a LinkedIn academy once. A whole group, gaming the system.
That’s not real growth. It just looks like it.
The internet is a free market. Anyone can show up. You pick your corner. You decide how you’ll appear. What you’ll share. Whether you’ll quit. Whether you’ll stay silent. Whether you’ll just watch.
This isn’t a rant. It’s an observation.
You’re competing with everyone. Your open source repo. Your blog post. Your YouTube video. Your LinkedIn update.
All of it, against the world.
And if five people show up? Ten people?
That still matters.
Go for the genuine thing. Not the vanity metrics.
The algorithm doesn’t care about you. But the people who find you? They do.
Build for them.
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