Dabi (Dr David Liu)

I write a HUGE amount about YouTube storytelling. Better stories ➡️ higher retention ➡️ more views ➡️ greater impact. I’ve been told by YT’ers from 0 to a few million subs, that these have been super helpful. Here’s the strategies I think will best help you grow. 🧵/∞ 1.

Just released! I made a more detailed video about the fundamentals of optimizing retention (and understanding retention graphs) for YouTubers: youtube.com/watch?v=tMsIp9…

11. The most valuable thing you can do, at any stage of your YouTube or life journey, is to greatly expand your self-concept. You can use great storytelling to turns hundreds of views into thousands, and thousands of views into millions. But what’s more important is the story…

8. Hooks are fundamentally emotional in nature, which is why there’s such a wide variety of hooks that work. But ironically, logic-based YouTubers are particularly good at templating and consistency. The best YouTubers combine logic with heart, and heart with logic. ⸻ 9. The…

7. “Don’t be cool, be warm.” The best creator–viewer relationships are based in respect and warmth. Not all creators will have this kind of dynamic with their viewers. But similar to how macro journey is important, a warm relationship will persist beyond novelty fatigue.

6. The emotional core of unscripted content directly depends on how much potential the set-up contains. Coming up with good unscripted situations can benefit from understanding elements of: - game design - tension in storytelling - visuals - tropes in plots

5. If all is known, there is nothing left to wait for. This is more a very basic principle of storytelling that has very deep reason for it (involving dopaminergic reward systems), but viewers need an open loop in order to stay. An open loop is an unresolved question.

4. Retention = Intention The most reductive way to think about retention, and therefore maybe one of the most powerful, is to ask at every point in the video: Is this a moment that satisfies the viewer’s intent? Enriches their experience in service of that intent?

3. Concept dictates story. This is nothing particularly new, but the story starts from the title and thumbnail. But it’s concept that determines all the potential momentum a story can generate in the first place.

2. Unnecessary filler is the new equivalent of what was once “excessive speed”. In an effort to correct the insane speed of retention editing, people have overcorrected into forced stutters/diversions for likability. They should be used to create space. Not boring segments.

🎉 Starting a mini tweet series: 11 Principles of YouTube Storytelling — 2025 thoughts that people aren’t thinking about. And we start today. 1. An individual video should provide a view into the broader character arc. Without a persistent through-line that is added to,…

There’s a massive problem with using AI as a writing tool: If you’re not good enough at AI, but also not good enough at writing, then it’s very obvious when you’re using AI to write. I think 1000 words of original thought beats a 10,000 word AI essay, any day of the week.…

Gen Z are better at social media. The millennials I was medical colleagues with who were locked in — they became physicians/surgeons. We’ve all put in 20,000 - 30,000 hours of our lives to it, minimum. Much of that is unseen, but you’ll know it at the moment you need them.

Amazing take

One of the weirdest official YouTube things is a survey asking you to rate other people’s comments. Would hazard a guess that this is going to be used to train an AI that filters out undesirable comments, such as spam and promotional comments. But without an explanatory…