The smell of aquarium salt is sharp and it lingers in the back of the throat. It is a clean smell but it is also heavy. I stood on the ladder and the water was warm against my wrists. I reached into the tank and the filter hummed against the glass.
The fish moved in a school and they did not care about the ladder or the salt. They moved because the water moved. I scrubbed the green film from the corner and it came away in clouds. It is a simple job but it requires a steady hand. If you move too fast the fish panic and the water becomes a storm of sand and waste.
I used to believe that competition was the salt of the earth. I thought it kept the water clean. I was wrong about that and I was wrong for a long time. I believed that if you put ten people in a room and you ranked them from top to bottom the bottom would climb and the top would run faster.
I thought the friction of the climb would create heat and that heat would power the engine of the company. I was wrong because people are not engines and they are not fish. They are something else and they respond to a leaderboard the way a reef responds to bleach.
The Memory of a Bright Room
The office was different . We sat in a room with white walls and the light was bright and it felt like a place where things were made. There were six creators and they worked on different channels.
One man made videos about old watches and another woman filmed the way people cooked in small apartments. They were not the same but they were in the same boat. They would sit on the couch and they would watch each other’s rough cuts.
The cook would look at the watchmaker’s intro and she would say the music is too loud. The watchmaker would nod and he would turn the music down. He would tell her that the camera angle on the frying pan was awkward and she would change it.
It was a trade and it was free. It was a commons. We had a shared pasture of honest notes and everyone’s cattle grew fat because no one was trying to steal the grass. It was a gift that cost nothing but it improved everything. We did not have a name for it then but we have a name for the absence of it now.
The Digital Fence
Then the management installed the board. It was a large digital screen in the hallway and it updated every hour. It pulled data from the API and it showed the views for every creator. It showed the subscriber growth and it showed the retention rate.
It was a leaderboard and it was meant to be a mirror. It was meant to show us who we were so we could be better. But the board was not a mirror. It was a fence. The rank of the first person was printed in gold and the rank of the last person was printed in red.
The difference of three people became the psychological distance between gold and red.
The numbers were precise. One man had 4,282 views and the woman below him had 4,279. The difference was three people but the difference on the board was the difference between gold and red. The board took the room and it divided it into winners and losers. It turned the shared pasture into a series of small yards and everyone put up wire.
842 Megabytes of Ghosts
I cleared my browser cache yesterday because the pages would not load and I felt a sudden desperate need to see a clean screen. I wanted to start over. I wanted to see the internet before it knew who I was.
The cache was of ghosts. It was a pile of data that slowed the machine. A leaderboard is a cache for a team. It is a pile of old wins and old losses that slows the movement of the people. It makes them heavy.
When the board went up the couch became empty. The cook did not ask the watchmaker about the music and the watchmaker did not mention the camera angle. If the watchmaker told the cook how to fix her intro she might get 500 more views.
Those 500 views might move her above him on the board. He would be in the red and she would be in the gold. Helping a colleague became a strategic sacrifice. It was a tax on your own standing.
The feedback dried up and the silence began. It was not a quiet silence but a loud one. It was the sound of people keeping their best ideas in their pockets. You could feel the friction in the hallway.
We stopped being a school of fish moving with the water and we became individuals fighting for the same flake of food. The commons was poisoned. We all had our own yards but the grass was turning brown because no one would share the water.
The Death of the Gift
A company can destroy its own collective intelligence by measuring individuals against each other. It is a simple mistake and it is made by people who like numbers more than they like results.
They think that by tracking the subscribers gained by one person they are measuring success. They are not. They are measuring the rate at which that person will stop helping the person next to them. They are measuring the death of the gift.
1,231
The truth is that YouTube is a cold place when you are starting alone. It is a cold start problem and it is a trust problem. When your own team stops giving you the social proof of their honest notes you have to find that momentum elsewhere.
You have to find a way to break the threshold of credibility so that the algorithm stops looking at you like a stranger. Creators often reach a point where the internal support system fails and they look for external signals to jumpstart the heart of the channel.
In the German market where the competition is as thick as the salt in my tanks, creators often decide to
to establish that first layer of trust. It is not about the number itself but about what the number signals to the next person who clicks.
It signals that this is a place where people stay. It is the artificial salt that makes the water habitable until the natural reef can grow.
The Silent Blue Tint
I watched a young creator sit at his desk for . He was editing a video about fountain pens. He had a problem with the color grade. It looked too blue. He knew the woman at the next desk was an expert in color.
He looked at her and then he looked at the leaderboard in the hall. He was at rank four and she was at rank five. If he asked her for help she would see his mistake. If she helped him his video would be better and he would stay ahead of her.
He stayed quiet. He kept his video blue and it performed poorly. She stayed at rank five and he eventually dropped to rank seven. They both lost because they were afraid of winning together.
The soot gets into the gears and it slows the machine. In a team where feedback is the primary currency a leaderboard acts as a counterfeit bill. It looks like value but it cannot be traded for anything real. It only buys ego and it only sells isolation.
I went back to the tank and I checked the pH level. It was and it was stable. The fish do not have a leaderboard. They do not know who swam the furthest or who ate the most shrimp. They survive because they move as one body.
When one fish turns the others turn. There is no friction in the turn because there is no ranking in the school. The water is the only judge and the water is indifferent to the individual.
The Tax on the Future
We think we are being professional when we track every metric but we are often just being lonely. We are trading the warmth of the couch for the cold light of the screen. We are clearing our caches and hoping for a faster load time but the slowdown is not in the computer.
The slowdown is in the heart. We have forgotten how to give a note that might help someone beat us. We have forgotten that if the whole boat moves faster we all get to the shore sooner.
The leaderboard is a fence that makes the pasture look small.
The friction of internal competition is a tax on the future. It is a deferred cost that is paid in mediocrity. When the watchmaker and the cook stop talking the videos get worse. The audience can feel the lack of care.
They can feel the blue tint on the fountain pen video and they turn away. The metrics go down for everyone and the management looks at the board and wonders why the gold is turning to lead. They think they need more data. They do not need more data. They need to turn off the screen and bring back the couch.
I finished the tank and I dried my hands. The salt was still there and my skin felt tight. It is a feeling you get used to. But I thought about the office and the digital board and the silence of the creators.
I thought about how much easier it is to scrub glass than it is to fix a broken culture. You can buy subscribers and you can buy views and you can buy social proof to bridge the gap of trust with the world.
You can use Nodedi to make sure your channel does not look like a ghost town. But you cannot buy the honest note from the person sitting three feet away from you once you have made them your enemy.
Winning in a Bright Room
That is the tragedy of the modern office. We have all the tools to talk but we have every reason to stay silent. We have the data to prove we are winning but we feel like we are losing.
I took my ladder and I walked out of the room. The fish were swimming in the clean water and they were beautiful. They did not need a rank to know which way to go. They only needed the water and they only needed each other.
The salt stayed on my skin and I did not wash it off. I wanted to remember how it felt to be wrong. I wanted to remember that the cleanest water is the water that everyone shares without a fence.
When you are building something on YouTube you are building a house in a crowded city. You need a foundation and you need a roof. The social proof is the foundation. It tells the neighbors that the house is safe.
But the feedback is the light inside the windows. If you turn off the light to keep the neighbors in the dark you will eventually find yourself sitting in a dark house. And no matter how high you are on the leaderboard the dark is still the dark.
I believe that now and I will not change my mind again. The cache is clear and the water is still. I will go home and I will not look at any boards. I will only look at the fish.
