It’s also worth noting that the algorithm is not the only meta and posting consistently might be more or less expected depending on your audience, topic and so on.
Absolutely, each audience has different expectations for what "quality" even means. Though I'm not really sure where "the algorithm" (I kinda hate how anthropomorphized it is) doesn't play into even in your scenario. Browse and Search are the two largest ways to grow traffic, and both are algorithmic to different degrees... unless you just mean like, growth is not a goal on YouTube for you, in which case, yeah you can just ignore all of this for sure.
But the language used around this topic is often implying that "the algorithm" will "punish you" if you like, post too often, post too little, post at different times... and I personally believe that that is empirically demonstrated to be not the case, and is also something YouTube (at least lately, I've only been paying close attention for a year or two) has never implied is important. And they've said things that imply that it's totally irrelevant, recommendation wise.
> But the language used around this topic is often implying that "the algorithm" will "punish you" if you like, post too often, post too little, post at different times...
These are all kinda true though?
- If you post too often your notifications get bundled, so now it's "x published two videos" instead of "x published that amazing video",
- if you post too little then people are less likely to recognize your username and thus just not click on it unless the creator really left an impression (this is probably the most dependent on the audience however).
- if you post at differing times you suddenly have to increase your audience significantly as your usual watchers won't be on YouTube at that moment, so you're effectively missing out on the initial upvotes by your fanbase until much later, reducing the chance of the video going into trending.
I mean they're not the only variables and they become pretty much non-issues as the channel grows, but all of these effects can be directly measured in clicks when the audience is still pretty small
