BestEvidence Now Has a Substack

Doing what I can to push back against ubiquitous fraud

I’ve started this substack as a workaround for YouTube’s systematic failure to notify my subscribers that I’ve posted new videos on my channel, BestEvidence.

I got this idea from a YouTube viewer:

As part of its suppression campaign against BestEvidence, YouTube also jams down my video’s view counts--more and more with each video—but that’s not really a problem; it’s actually comical to see YouTube’s own data reflect metrics that are impossible, like (far) more thumbs up than total views, which occurs for the first several hours once I release a new video.

When YouTube repeatedly docks the view count of a BestEvidence video by 200 or 300 or 500 views, I just laugh. It amuses me that a channel as small as mine poses such a threat to a giant company that it feels compelled to report fraudulent numbers rather than real ones. What makes it funny isn’t simply that google (YouTube’s parent company and the world’s 2nd largest cash cow) is a closeted crumb-snatcher, it’s that the crumbs it’s snatching from BestEvidence have zero monetary value: I’ve never monetized any of my videos, so it’s not as if google gets any money by systematically lying about how many views a BestEvidence video has.

And on a more direct personal level, it’s not as if I can restore the thousands of views that YouTube steals from my view counts.

Separately, however, YouTube’s increasingly aggressive suppression of BestEvidence has also resulted in more and more complaints from viewers (the one from loniousmonk above is just one of many I’ve gotten) about not receiving notifications of new videos despite signing up for them. Unlike YouTube’s view count fraud, this is a both a real problem (stealing views as opposed to view counts), and it is one that I can do something about.

This substack is my way of doing what I can to notify viewers who want to be notified that I have a new video up. YouTube claims to be doing exactly that, but that’s just another fraud.

I’ll have more to say about the advantages of running a substack in parallel with my video channel later.

For now, if you’d like to receive notifications of my new videos, sign up for this substack. It’s free.

—John Titus