What I found out about the platforms I have been posting on

I spent today going through everything I have ever put on YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn. Not making anything. Counting it, and reading how the three places actually work, because I have been posting on all of them for years without understanding any of them.

The short version is that about 1.7 million people have watched something I made, and I have never once asked a single one of them for anything. That is not a feeling. It is what the numbers say when you put them next to each other.

This note is not finished and will not be for a long time. I am keeping it so that when I decide something I can come back and change the line that was wrong.

The thing I did not know existed

I have an eight and a half minute film about a year of the work. It has been public since March 2024. It has 27 views.

I have a thirty-five second reel of the same forest. It has been watched 709,689 times.

Same man, same camera, same hillside. I used to read the 27 as a verdict on the work — that nobody cares. What I learned today is that the two platforms asked me for different things and I only ever knew about one of them.

Instagram plays a video at you. Nothing is asked of you first, so the only job is to hold you once it starts, and I am apparently good at that. YouTube shows a title and a picture to a small group of people and waits to see if anybody clicks. If nobody clicks, it stops, and the eight minutes are never watched by anyone. My title was “one year of our work from 2023 to 2024”. There is no reason in that sentence for a stranger to press it.

So the film did not fail. It was never shown. That is a different problem and it is a fixable one.

What each of the three actually wants

YouTube decides per video, not per channel. A video that does nothing does not damage the channel, and changing subject does not confuse anything. That is why I am not starting a new channel. The gate is the click, and the click is decided by the title, the thumbnail, and whether the idea in them is something a stranger wants. Retitling old videos is free, and YouTube will test two or three versions of a title against each other and pick the winner by watch time. It also says plainly that how often I upload is not connected to how much it grows, which means the monthly gaps I felt guilty about cost me nothing.

Instagram is a recommendation engine that also shows you your friends. A reel goes to a small group of strangers first and their behaviour decides whether it goes wider. What it counts most is people sending it to one other person, and watching it through — not likes. My followers barely matter to it, which is strange to write down, and true.

LinkedIn reads the last thousand things that were put in front of a person and predicts from that sequence. This is the part that explains my whole history there. If I post once and then go quiet for a year, the next post is starting from nothing, because the last one has fallen out of the window. If I post every week, each one lands while the last is still counted. So being regular is not discipline there, it is mechanics. It also punishes a post that people scroll past, and it counts how long they stayed and whether they commented far above whether they pressed like. Hashtags are finished — the pages and the following were removed in 2024, so the tags I have been putting on everything have been pushing into nothing.

Where they disagree, which is why the advice never worked

This is the part I could not have worked out by reading tips.

Being regular is required on LinkedIn and irrelevant on YouTube. A YouTube video can keep collecting views for years; a LinkedIn post is finished in a day or two; a reel is a spike. Followers matter most on LinkedIn, least on Instagram. YouTube makes you earn a click before anything else happens; Instagram never asks for one. Longer can win on YouTube because it counts total watch time, and shorter usually wins on Instagram because it counts whether you finished.

So there is no such thing as advice about social media. Every rule I have read was true about one of these places and wrong about another, and I was applying all of them everywhere at once.

The mistakes, and I would rather write them down than not

My captions name the thing instead of speaking to anyone. 153 of my 157 Instagram captions describe an object — a pooja, a festival, a date. Four of them have a question in them. Those four have a middle figure of 173,622 plays. The middle figure for all my reels is 983.

My YouTube titles are filing labels. “23 February 2025”. “road work”. “0206”. On the one platform where a stranger has to choose to press the thing, I gave them nothing to press.

I numbered a series on a platform where nobody is subscribed. Thirteen posts saying “Ep 7” and so on, middle figure 419 plays, most of them at the bottom of the account. I think I read that as Telugu not travelling. It might just have been the numbering telling people they had missed six things.

I uploaded raw where I should have cut. The forest fire is 29,256 plays as a thirty-four second reel and 21 views as a one minute forty-six upload. The Kamakshi Pratishtha is a 13,610 play reel and three unlisted uploads of over an hour at four to thirteen views. Same events, same footage. The cutting is the entire difference, and I have hours of it uncut.

Half of what is on my LinkedIn is other people’s. 54 of 116 items are reposts, and a repost gives nobody anything of mine to answer.

Nothing anywhere points at this site. Not a bio, not a caption, not a video description. In the last ninety days one person tapped the link on my Instagram — one. My bios send people to Google Maps and to a temple site. One of them still links a handle that is a 404. The word road does not appear in any of my 217 captions. The temple does not appear in any of the 116 things on my LinkedIn.

And across 217 posts, 366 videos and 116 LinkedIn items, I never asked anyone for anything. Not once.

The numbers I did not want to look at

261,440 views on the channel since June 2021. 1,140 subscribers. That is 0.4%. 97.9% of the people who watch have never watched before, and 95.4% of the watching time comes from people who are not subscribed. Studio cannot even describe my audience — it says there is not enough data — which is what it looks like when there is no audience, only traffic.

Of 271 videos, 86 are public, 73 unlisted and 108 private. Most of the private ones are hours of work footage at one to five views. I set five Python livestreams to private myself today. They had nothing to do with any of this.

I wanted to make the whole channel private and start again. I have started again more times than I want to count and it has never once helped, and the old footage is the only thing I have that nobody else has. So no.

What I decided today

One YouTube channel. Not a new one.

One Instagram account, in my own name, not a brand. The reason is the same one this whole site is built on: people help one person, and it stops working as soon as there are two.

What I have not decided

Whether to speak Telugu on camera and let the platforms put English on it. Both of them will now do that, and Telugu is on the list. I have not said yes. My English on camera is worse than my Telugu and I do not know yet how much that costs against how much further English reaches.

Whether to put the Kona story on LinkedIn as engineering — what broke, what we worked out, what it cost — rather than as a story with a lesson at the end. Most of the people who follow me there build things for a living, and none of them know about the road.

Whether I can tell the Kona story publicly at all now. That work is finished and I have no connection with the temple any more, and I have not worked out what I am still entitled to say about the four years I spent on it.

What I make first. I have been asked twice and I have not answered.

The one I am most suspicious of

I said I want six months to a year to learn how this works before I make anything. That is honestly what I want.

It is also exactly what starting again sounds like when it has grown up. I have restarted this many times and “I will learn properly first” is the most reasonable version of it I have ever come up with. I am writing that down here so that in three months I can check which one it turned out to be.

Where I stopped today, and where I start tomorrow

Today was mostly reading and counting. Two things I settled — one channel, my own name — are about how I work rather than about what I found. The rest of it I did not want to decide tired.

So tomorrow is the practice. Not more research — what I do on a day. Whom I watch, and what I am supposed to be looking at when I watch them. Which platform I learn first, because I found out today that the three of them contradict each other and learning all three at once is probably how I have been getting it wrong. Where I write the patterns down so that a thing I notice in September is still legible in January. What I publish while I am still learning, and how bad it is allowed to be. And how I would know any of it is working, given that I do not need it to succeed and that counting replies would show me zero for years and then I would stop.

Three things are still sitting there unanswered and I am writing them down so they do not quietly go away. What I make first — I have been asked twice. Whether I speak Telugu on camera and let the platforms put English on it. And whether my phone number stays on the about page once anything out there starts pointing here.