It was YouTube, 2008

I began my slow, minimally successful journey as a content creator (before the term existed) in 2008. Or perhaps it was late 2007 -- most of that time period remains but a blur in my memory (it was, as you might have guessed, high school). It began on YouTube. And it began with -- it may have been a minute since you thought of these -- a video response.

YouTubed eventually removed video responses as a feature in 2013. But in 2007/2008, they were a community-building goldmine. It would turn out that they weren't good for generating advertising revenue. But they were very good for building up your channel within a very specific niche.

Even back then, I was a book enthusiast. Someone in the then quite small Nerdfighter community had uploaded a video where commenters would ask them questions, which they would answer by flipping to a random page in a book and reading a passage. The meaning of the passage (yes or no) was largely up to interpretation.

I, of course, commented with a question, which they "answered" in a subsequent video. At the time, I was so enthused about the engagement that I decided to make a (cringe) video response to it. Think of it like a quote tweet, except in video form. Or sort of like a TikTok stitch.

That was a formative experience for me. I had never put myself out there like that, especially not with a video. It was a lot scarier to do that back then, when there were far fewer videos and very tight-knit communities filled with YouTubers who all knew each other. People saw that video. It didn't result in much of anything, but it was my first step into what would become a much larger digital landscape of content creation.

I would say I have no regrets. But I will always wonder if, back in 2008, I could have risen to some kind of status within a niche in the early days -- enough to make money, perhaps set myself up for some kind of career.

I guess we'll never know.