The problem I'm building against is the one stopping me

30 SEP 2026

This is the first actual journal note I'm writing and I have no clue what I'm doing.

And I especially have no clue what I should be doing, and am not.

Trying to discover good content has become DIFFICULT

Doesn't make sense, right?

It does.

The world became too addicted to clickbait-y titles, topics, and framings. They get most of the clicks, so everyone started optimizing towards it. This caused genuinely good creators to start blending in - morphing their titles and thumbnails into more generic, clickable versions.

But why would they?

Because retention determines who gets popular, but your video has to be clicked in the first place. Titles became too similar, so distinguishing between great and slop content via titles and thumbnails semi-reliably isn't all that easy anymore. Everything gets clicked, including slop, and it's in a VAST quantity, drowning plenty of talented creators in rankings by the sheer volume.

Which means, when I'm trying to discover new creators, I'm struggling to find unknown ones - big names show up, slop shows up, relatively lower quality shows up, but relatively unknown creators don't.

Which is exactly the problem I'm trying to resolve - making high quality creators and content easy and straightforward to discover - now facing it myself, firsthand.

Why this is a pretty big problem

The entire premise of the test run is to check whether people actually care about having a place where everything you click is of a high quality, guaranteed - therefore never having to worry about clicking anything and leaving dissatisfied. More precisely, minimizing the chances of that.

Without sustained discovery of top tier content in a decent volume there are no new entries to add. Without new entries people don't come and Cabin doesn't grow its own audience. Without audience, there is no recommendation of such unknown creators. Self-closed loop - the chicken and egg problem.

Without audience, there is no reputation. Without reputation, no one takes Cabin seriously, therefore, people just scroll through Cabin's call for such creators.

How I'm fighting this off for now

Personal outreach to people I know. Asking for recommendations for relatively "smaller"-sized channels, something like <150K subs, and going through their content.

This works, but it's not a sustained volume. And I encountered the issue I described above - those creators trying to blend in, morphing their title, and causing mismatch in the premise and the delivery. Even tho their content is really high quality, it isn't what I expected from their title. That's disappointing.