Nobody searches for what Juan did

To get chapter markers on YouTube videos you need “advanced verification”, and that turned into its own small saga: the face-scan check silently bound itself to the wrong account and never worked ▸ 4:35, while a passport photo went through on the first try ▸ 5:51. Then come the format rules: chapters must start at 0:00, keep at least ten seconds between markers, and there must be at least three of them ▸ 6:40. No API for it, so all 21 published videos got their chapters pasted in by hand ▸ 7:14.

21 videos, capítulo por capítulo, a mano →

The real teaching arrived about six videos in. The first chapter-writing instruction produced storytelling titles, the kind that narrate the episode: “Juan messes it up”, “Julia did such-and-such” ▸ 7:54. Charming, useless. Chapters are a search surface, and nobody searches for what Juan did. Nobody types “what does Juan say about the DIAN” into Google. People search for information: keywords, how-to phrases, questions ▸ 8:28.

So the instruction got rewritten mid-batch: chapters as searchable phrases, not plot beats. The distinction generalizes well beyond YouTube. Anything you title, a chapter, a heading, a doc page, serves two different readers: the one already inside your story and the stranger arriving through a query. The story reader forgives keyword-shaped titles. The stranger never finds the storytelling ones at all.

There is a quiet symmetry with the day job of this whole diary: the videos are the story format, and everything downstream of them, chapters, this blog, has to be translated into the shapes people actually search. The narrating voice is for the people already here…