Working with insular communities like /r/NewTubers often brings up some vague or incomplete advice bordering on superstition - based on a grain of truth but stretched out in horribly exaggerated ways, and thereby misunderstood and repeated ad infinitum.

The one going around a lot is something like:

Don't share your videos on Reddit. You will have a lower retention, which will mean your videos will not be promoted, etc.

Let's look at the facts:

• Sharing videos on Reddit will generally see a drop a retention for your video
• Retention is one of the factors in the YouTube algorithm

The logical conclusion is that you shouldn't share on Reddit if you want to preserve the best chances of you gaining traction on YouTube.

And that's wrong.

Here's the thing: YouTube doesn't recognise who shares a video. They might track where the views come from and how much they watch, but there's no actual connection between who does the sharing. Going by the NewTuber logic, I could destroy your video and channel by sharing your video - and that's an absolutely baffling reversal of how the system works.

You want people to share videos widely for views and watch time, which are understood to be more important than retention. The increased exposure is worth the decrease in retention if the video is able to generate buzz, hype, awareness and view counts, even if slightly.

The reason why retention goes down is that you are simply widening your potential viewership. The more people there are, the less likely they will all stay to watch the entire video. Some will click in and check it out; a few will stay and find the whole thing interesting. That's just the nature of the mass market. If you're used to seeing extraordinary high retention rates (50% ), you're either making very short videos or you are skewing your results by filtering views to a select handful of viewers.

There are many reasons why you shouldn't spam links on Reddit, but you need to stop prioritising viewer retention above all else. It's better to have 10,000 people who might watch most of your video than 100 people who actually do. You can't get 100% of people watching 100% of your video, so don't even try for that goal.

Remember, people share videos all the time, and that's a good thing.