Thursday, July 2, 2026
8:50 a.m. Room A1 Makhota Vibe Inn
Melaka, Malaysia
I’m not sure what I’m going to write about this morning. There were no big adventures yesterday or the day before or even the day before that. I’ve just been dealing with YouTube stuff, such as the re-edit of the Ship Graveyard video and first edits of the dragon boat races video. I suppose I can start with that and see where my thoughts lead.
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn anything from the experiment of posting a new version of my video about the ship graveyard. As I wrote about at length already, I was disappointed at the response to that video, and I started thinking about ways that day could be packaged in a video to be more entertaining and more appealing. And so I fiddled around with it and changed the opening and the ending and the title and the thumbnail. I was curious if this new packaging for essentially the same story and the same video would somehow change its popularity both with the YouTube algorithm and with international viewers. But there was essentially no change. I don’t generally dive into the statistics that YouTube provides. To be honest, they’re just depressing. At least when you ignore the statistics, you can comfort yourself with fantasy. But to see those cold, cruel numbers really sucks the life out of you. But in this case, I looked at some of the numbers and compared the original video with the new version, and there was no difference at all. The only difference was the number of comments from people who were confused by what I was doing. People are always confused by the things I do, but in this case, there were MORE confused people because they didn’t know why I posted a new version of an old video. In the end, I learned nothing.
I also posted my first video about the dragon boat races, and I was disappointed at the response again. I guess I was wrong, but I thought that dragon boat races in Melaka were a big deal, a kind of national event, and that just making a video about them would draw some attention. I even extended my stay in Melaka by many days just to be able to attend this event and shoot some video. But I was wrong about that. I suspected I was wrong even when I went to shoot video on the first day, and I saw that there were almost no spectators. I thought the city would be jammed with visitors and the riverside would be packed with people – thousands or tens of thousands. But on the first day, it felt like there was one spectator – me. Everyone else was either a member of a dragon boat team, a family member, or a professional photographer. And the races seemed to be aimed at the participants, NOT at an audience. It felt almost like a private event for the dragon boat teams rather than a public spectacle. There were more people watching on the second day, but it still felt rather quiet.
And the response to my video mirrors the understated and quiet nature of the event itself. People reacted with a muted “meh”. Of course, the video I ended up with is completely different from the video I planned. My plan was to make a normal YouTube video. By that, I mean that I was going to shoot exciting video of the races and shoot video of the cheering spectators. I even had grandiose ideas of interviewing the dragon boat team members and mounting cameras on the boats to get a POV of the races themselves. And I was going to package it like a normal YouTube video and make it short and sweet and fun.
Of course, all those plans went right out the window right from the start. Part of the problem was that when I got to the river, there were no cheering crowds. And there was no information about what was going on. I had no clue which dragon boat team was which. Whenever a race occurred, I didn’t know who was racing. I didn’t know the details of each race or what was at stake. Another problem was the teams didn’t use their own dragon boats. They simply climbed into whichever boat was ready at the dock. So it wasn’t possible to get to know one of the teams and ask them for permission to mount one of my cameras on their boat. They didn’t have their own boat. I would have to get permission from the race organizers, and that wasn’t really a possibility considering this was race day and they were extremely busy and I would need time to figure out how to even mount a camera.
In the end, the video ended up exactly like a typical Planet Doug vlog. The video is all about me wandering around and trying to figure out what is going on and talking a lot about the logistics and the organization of the races. To be fair, that’s actually what I’m more interested in. I’m not the type of person to join cheering crowds and chant and yell to support a team. I’m not a cheerleader type of person. Given a choice, I would much rather organize an event than take part in it. It would be more interesting to me to be involved in organizing the dragon boat races than being a member of a dragon boat team. I would enjoy that a LOT more.
So it makes sense that I drifted into my natural element, which was looking hard at the logistics and planning and how the dragon boat races were organized. And once I was at the river with all the action going on, it felt unrealistic to follow through on my original impulse to interact with dragon boat team members and record those interactions. For that kind of video, I run into the usual problem of how to record the video and audio. It’s one thing to chat with people. That’s easy. I can chat all day. But how do you record that chat when you are the holding the camera? And how do you record both your voice and their voice? I don’t have the technology nor the personality to do that.
Anyway, I shot a normal Planet Doug vlog, and for a typical YouTube audience, I guess it is somewhat boring and long. Since I posted the first video and saw that it won’t strike a chord with a wide audience, I’ve noticed that the dragon boat races in general are not popular. I was expecting to see a whole bunch of YouTube videos about them, just like you see a flood of YouTube videos every year on independence day. YouTubers fly into the country specifically to record those videos because they are so popular. I thought there would be an element of that here. But I don’t see anything on YouTuber other than a couple of shorts posted by the teams themselves as they win this or that race. I haven’t seen a single video by a typical YouTube travel vlogger covering the event. And now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense. I remember dragon boat races being hugely popular in Taiwan. But Taiwan is a majority Chinese country. And Malaysia is not. So I think the dragon boat races are of interest to the Malaysian Chinese community, but not outside of that. I haven’t done a deep dive into the comments to the video I posted, but I got a sense that people were saying that this was a small regional event organized by the Melaka Chinese community, and outside of that, nobody cares about it. In fact, there was one comment that got screened and held back because the person used bad language, but they were dumping all over the Melaka dragon boat races saying how bad they were and how the races in other places were much better with better boats, etc. Perhaps if I had known that this event was very limited in its appeal I would not have devoted this last week to attending it and making videos about it. I guess if I want to be a professional YouTuber, I should pay attention to trends and cover events that people are actually interested in rather than what I’m interested in.