Every creator eventually asks the same question:

"Why did that video work... and this one didn't?"

After four years on Rumble, I still can't answer that question with confidence.

That's a problem.

I've been on Rumble for four years—not as someone who uploads a video once in a while, but as someone who's built a business here. I've uploaded thousands of videos: livestreams, clips, Shorts, gaming, podcasts, political commentary, and ministry content. I've spent countless hours trying to understand what works, what doesn't, and, more importantly, why.

I own Rumble stock because I believe in what the company is trying to build. I pay Rumble every month for cloud infrastructure, and my media company depends on Rumble's success.

That's exactly why this isn't a hit piece. It's a conversation I think the platform needs to have.

The easiest answer whenever creators struggle is simple:

"Make better content."

Sometimes that's absolutely true. Sometimes your thumbnail is weak. Sometimes your title isn't compelling. Sometimes the content simply isn't good enough. Creators—including me—need to be honest about that.

But there's another side of the equation that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

How do you improve when you can't tell how people found your content in the first place?

That's where I think Rumble's biggest weakness lives.

Not censorship.

Not monetization.

Discoverability.

Over the past year I've been building Fang Chen AI—not a chatbot, but an archival intelligence system for my business. One of Fang's primary jobs is to read. She processes transcripts, production logs, creator discussions, operational history, and internal reporting so I can spot recurring patterns instead of relying on memory alone.

Ironically, Fang exists because I couldn't answer basic operational questions with the tools available to me. So I started building my own.

One thing surprised me.

The same complaints kept surfacing from completely unrelated creators. Different audiences. Different politics. Different content. Different channel sizes.

Yet many were asking remarkably similar questions:

Why can't I find my own videos?
Why is search inconsistent?
Where are viewers actually coming from?
Why are the analytics so limited?
Where's the developer API?

Those aren't identical complaints.

They rhyme.

Different creators are describing the same frustration from different angles. When that happens often enough, it stops looking like isolated anecdotes and starts looking like a product problem worth investigating.

When I stepped outside my own ecosystem and started reading creator discussions on Reddit, X, forums, podcasts, blogs, and developer communities, I noticed the same themes appearing again and again.

There isn't unanimous agreement. Some creators report improving search. Others remain optimistic about where Rumble is headed.

That's healthy.

But recurring frustrations around discoverability, analytics, and creator tooling appear often enough that they're difficult to dismiss as isolated complaints.

That doesn't prove every criticism is correct.

It does suggest they're worth listening to.

So I stopped relying on anecdotes.

I started testing.

Not for a weekend.

For years.

Today my library contains more than two thousand videos and livestreams spanning Baldur's Gate 3, Mortal Kombat 1, political commentary, podcasts, Shorts, and long-form livestreams. I experimented with different titles, metadata, release schedules, categories, and upload strategies.

I wasn't trying to prove Rumble was broken.

I was trying to understand how discovery actually worked.

What I kept running into wasn't proof of some grand conspiracy.

It was uncertainty.

Sometimes search behaved exactly the way I'd expect.

Sometimes it didn't.

Sometimes older content became surprisingly difficult to find.

Sometimes even knowing exactly what I was looking for didn't produce intuitive results.

When you're casually uploading videos, that's annoying.

When you're running a media company, it becomes an operational problem.

One subject that inevitably comes up whenever creators gather is favoritism. I want to be careful here because words matter.

I'm not saying Rumble secretly rigs the platform.

I'm not claiming there are smoke-filled rooms deciding who succeeds.

What I am saying is that transparency matters because perception matters.

If creators can't distinguish between editorial promotion, organic discovery, recommendations, subscriber traffic, search traffic, or outside referrals, they'll naturally start inventing explanations.

Human beings are wired to explain uncertainty. When information is missing, we create narratives to fill the gaps. That's not unique to Rumble—that's human nature.

The solution isn't telling creators they're wrong.

The solution is giving them enough information that fewer questions go unanswered.

Transparency builds trust.

Mystery creates suspicion.

There's another disconnect I've noticed over the years.

Established creators often tell smaller creators to work harder. I don't think most of them mean anything malicious by it. Many of them worked incredibly hard to build their audiences, and they earned their success.

But their experience isn't necessarily today's experience.

A creator with an established audience is solving a different problem than someone trying to build one from scratch.

Those are two different conversations.

Neither side is necessarily wrong.

They're simply looking at the platform from different perspectives.

Then there's the issue closest to home: developer tooling.

This one frustrates me—not because I want convenience, but because I see opportunity.

Imagine what independent developers could build if Rumble embraced them: creator dashboards, workflow automation, search analysis, editorial pipelines, research tools, performance reporting, cross-platform analytics, and recommendation experiments.

I'm building AI systems because that's what my company does. Every time I hit a wall because something can't be measured or accessed programmatically, I don't just lose time.

The platform loses innovation.

Every platform eventually reaches a point where some of its biggest innovations come from people who don't work there.

Give developers the tools.

They'll surprise you.

I don't believe Rumble wakes up every morning asking how to suppress small creators. Frankly, I think they're trying to solve an incredibly difficult engineering problem while competing against one of the largest technology companies on Earth.

That's not easy.

But good intentions don't eliminate the need for better tools.

If anything, they make those tools even more important.

This isn't a request for guaranteed views.

Nobody deserves an audience.

Nobody deserves to go viral.

Nobody deserves subscribers simply because they worked hard.

That's not how the internet works.

What creators do deserve is information.

Tell me where my audience came from.
Tell me which searches found my content.
Tell me which recommendations worked.
Tell me what failed.

Let me fail intelligently.

Right now, too much of the process still feels like educated guesswork.

I criticize Rumble because I want to keep building here.

If I thought the platform was hopeless, I'd quietly move on.

Instead, I'm investing in it—financially, professionally, and personally.

I believe Rumble still has something most tech companies lost years ago: a willingness to challenge the status quo.

Now I'd like to see that same willingness applied inward.

Build better analytics.
Expand developer access.
Continue improving search.
Give creators more visibility into how discovery actually works.

Not because Reddit says so.

Not because every frustrated creator is right.

But because understanding your users is how good platforms become great ones.

I don't want Rumble to become YouTube.

I want Rumble to become the platform creators wish YouTube had become.

That starts with trust.

Trust isn't built by telling creators to work harder.

It's built by giving them the information they need to improve.

After four years on Rumble, I still believe that's possible.

That's why I'm still here.