goodbye for now, YouTube

farewell fickle algo, and what's next for my work

Before you dive in, rest assured this essay was written using 100% human intelligence. I do not use AI in my work. I’m AI Sober and it feels delicious. You can read my full AI Policy here.

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Howdy, big news!!! I’m taking a massive and potentially indefinite break from YouTube. I will no longer make and post free classes and/or video essays on that platform for the foreseeable future.

Before I get into the why around leaving, I wanna invite you to join the Week of the Archivist as a last minute student. We start tonight! Over the next six days, we are going to be cleaning and organizing our phones and computer stuff, building digital gardens, and learning as a collective why archiving is a vital creative practice.

Tickets are on sale until 5PM PST, class starts at 6, and I am so stoked to guide this group. You can learn more about why you should take the class/have a digital garden, read why I wasn’t always “good” at maintaining my digital life, and why all of this matters for a creative practice anyway. Recordings available with special discounts on 1-on-1 tutoring if you can’t make it live!

Also this week, I was on the Soil and Stars Podcast with my friend Emily Hall! If you’re into astrology, herbalism, tarot, and the archetype of Venus, you’ll be real into the show. We talk about my adventure art practice, AI sobriety, & earth intelligence.

Ok, now let’s get into what is going on with me and YouTube. 💔

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Quite a lot of you here found my work through the Persistent Bloom YouTube channel. A place where I’ve shared sketchbook tours, free classes on creativity and persistence, examples of creative retreats, plein air painting videos, and strategies for artists to bloom in their practice since fall of 2023.

I deeply love making videos, the format is fun, editing and adding memes is a blast. But, something strange has been happening. As I have gotten better at making things that feel true to the soul of my work and what I want to offer as an act of generosity to others, YouTube the platform, has little to no interest in it.

a screenshot showing my hand-collaged thumbnails. I am so glad this process has made me fall deeply in love with collage again

Reflecting, I know the work is quality because when I share the same essays here on Substack, the replies I get in my inbox are full of rich stories of resonance. Here, I am building depth. Over on YouTube, I feel like I’m swimming upstream while being offered diminishing returns. I am not a salmon heading to spawn though, and my body has been telling at me that I’m heading towards burnout.

This is no longer a reliable platform for me to keep investing in. I’m rarely ever meeting new students or tutoring clients there.¹ I don’t see it driving much traffic to my website, newsletter, or community anymore. So, it needs to transform into a hobby I do for fun, rooted in joy and showcasing my art —completely divorced from results.

I had a revelation last weekend as I finished reading The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen where he lays out the struggles of contorting to ratings and metrics with a concept he calls value capture. This is when we are giving away our subtle inner intrinsic values — the things that make art and games playful and rich and fun — to contort to the standardization and easy legibility that metrics based algorithms reward. The core argument of the book centers around the problems that come up when we are trying to contort to the needs of platforms or institutions. Optimizing everything we share to fit what the metrics themselves ask for.

Now there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this per se, and I have nothing personal, at all, against folks who are good at playing into the whims and desires of optimizing content for better evaluations by YouTube’s algorithm. Mad respect to the folks on there making a real living, getting the views, Adsense revenue, and sponsorships, but, I’m driven by my desire to pursue art as a wellness practice.² To value process over all else. This book helped me realize that my unwillingness to contort to the needs of the platform means that what I’m sharing there is fundamentally at odds with what that place wants.

I’m finally at peace with this.

For the past few months, I’ve been struggling with this decision. Low level freaking out, and trying to improve. I started making hand-drawn collages for every video, in order to be clear that I’m not using AI. Yet each video is subsequently doing worse than the one before and I have been stuck on a demoralizing conveyor.

At the start of 2026 I wrote a manifesto about how art and metrics cannot go hand in hand. This was about my existing frustration with YouTube. But I have to admit I still check the dashboard like a fool and it makes me feel gross. I have cried over it too many times this year. Cried, over an algorithm? Ew. I hate that! It’s bad for my mental health and for the perception of my work as valuable to others.

Unfortunately, this behavior of checking and craving success is very tricky to unlearn.³ Occasionally, things I share do really well, but that’s totally unreliable. The intermittent reward system dangles a carrot to keep me trying. This carrot being the promise to connect me and the work I do with more people, to help me make a living. It is so clear that this isn’t its function anymore, at least not for me. When I share something heart-aligned, the boss of that platform, like an evil twisted version of my inner critic is scowling: “not good enough, try again!”

the manifesto I wrote in January became a little print flyer that I send out with every art or print order on my website.

In deeper reflections, much of my past success came from tapping into people’s rage and frustrations. It also came from making short-form digestible versions of my ideas that led to lots of misunderstandings. When I watch the videos back that got the highest view counts, I don’t really like the way I sound, especially after I started getting intense reactions in the comments.

I was making people anxious, riling up their emotions and frustrations. This kind of activation is not for someone with a nervous system like mine. I always felt bad whenever a video did really well. I kept getting misunderstood. So I tried to pivot over and over to things that have felt more aligned, honest, and true, but no matter what I’ve tried, the results I get are completely random and I can’t rely on randomness to pay my bills.

This diet of intermittent rewards and punishment for not contorting to the guidance of the metrics has finally worn me down. It is absolutely time to make changes that I know could have consequences in the long term for my work. But I have to change, the foundation has to be different if I am going to keep doing this in some capacity.

To add fuel to this already burning fire, Youtube is adding a new Ask YouTube feature, turning search into a chatbot. Y’all know how I feel about AI already… there are now AI summaries added to every video — with no option to opt out.

The AI enshittification is bad for anyone trying to make a living on YouTube:

1. There will be no more earning trust with strangers through a title and thumbnail, Google is feeding the content of our videos into AI which will then suggest only what is relevant to a user’s chat.

2. What’s really bad about this is that AI summaries — which again, creators can’t opt out of — will do to YouTube what AI has already done to web search. Spit out summaries to the person chatting, giving someone no reason to watch the video for an answer or close the open loop of curiosity that the title and thumbnail were designed to open.

So yeah, it is time to nope the hell out of there! Just like when I burned out in the art world, I have to choose freedom over prestige, yet again. There is real grief to this choice. I know this is going to disappoint people. But I’m clearly not reaching my 7600 subscribers reliably. I must return to the fun and play that made me start making videos there in the first place.

So here’s what’s going to happen:

I’m going to take the time I get back to paint more and start making bigger work. You should get on the collectors list if you wanna be first to know when things are dry and ready to ship out. This will also let me do more in-person makers markets in the Bay Area to sell my work!

I will still write weekly essays and dispatches here on Substack. My goal is to make them even better as I give myself more time to deepen into the craft of writing. Here I can reach everyone who signs up in their email inbox, no algorithm needed. As the internet gets weirder, I’m gonna connect with those of you out there who love reading. Maybe consider becoming a paid supporter to help provide scaffolding for this transition, cuz it’s gonna be rocky!

Instead of making and producing bi-weekly videos, I’ll be composting that energy into a new garden bed — the renewed Persistent Bloom podcast (the place this work began in 2022), where I am currently posting audio versions of the essays I write here that people can listen to for free.⁴ In the fall, the pod will expand to include conversations with artists and human creatives in my community, focused on what persistence looks like in practices beyond my own. I’d love for you to start listening, to leave a review, and share the show with others.

If you still want to watch videos, I will be making and posting some studio tours and playful painting process vlogs, for folks who support me over on Patreon. There’s already an exclusive video over there from our trip to the Sierras! I’m so stoked to make things there and not have to think about thumbnails anymore!

If you really like my teaching style that I’ve shared on YouTube, sign up for one of my classes. Teaching is such a rewarding practice for me. You might also like the Persistent Bloom Discord which is a robust community of international artists working to sustain their practices together online.

The Youtube Channel version of Persistent Bloom will grow into the thing I wanted at the very beginning, a place to share my art adventures with the world. I’m only going to make and produce plein air painting videos with my spouse, Wes Jackson.

a still from a video Wes shot of me working in Tuolumne Meadows with watercolors

We want to focus on quality, depth, and authenticity. We want to make things where we don’t have to ask ourselves “will this get clicks?” These videos will take a lot longer to produce because we will treat them like art. We want those who watch to give their full attention, so there will be no talking, just captions and nature sounds! Wes and I are working on experiments for composing music for these short films as well. We want this project to be an even richer collaboration between the two of us. You can see this playlist of videos we made over that last few years that are the root of the kind of films and video-as-art-practice we want to be making.

Older videos that showcase my teaching style are going to get slowly unlisted and worked into parts of my website. I’d love for people to learn how I teach on an internet destination I have full control over. A place without distractions and other things offering to pull their attention away.

I want to focus more on the actual enjoyment of the process of filmmaking for my well being and my soul. This is a move to protect my wellbeing and the long term sustainability of what I share with the world! Thank you so much for reading, for being here on my newsletter, helping me feel brave enough to make this leap, and until next time, stay creative and find your own ways to persistently bloom.

1. this was not always the case! It use to be so helpful! but now the results on this platform are so random that it makes my strategic Capricorn-rising brain struggle. I see what “success” looks like for others and either I can’t replicate it due to a lack of luck or a lack of willingness to play rage ball.

2. I also do not have the teflon-strength heart to handle the misogynistic and queerphobic comments I get about my appearance and how I talk. Exposing yourself in a video format is so damn vulnerable and people can be so cruel!

3. Once you have one video get over 150,000 views, and you ride that roller coaster, so much time is spent on trying to remanufacture that success.

4. if you use Spotify for podcasts instead of Apple, the pod link is here. I need to build out a page on my website for the pod, but that’s on my to-do for later this month… when I have time!