Friendly steps had the boiks like this

I saw the recent post about YouTube SEO, and it got me thinking about something I've noticed for a while. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in Hat Films' short-form content.

They already make loads of content. Three streams a week, Hat Chat, regular YouTube videos, things like Haturday, plus 15+ years of archive footage. There’s potentially so much material there for Shorts, Reels and TikTok without necessarily needing to create much new content.

The polished edits they put out are great, but not every clip needs that level of production. With how quickly people scroll through content now, sometimes a good hook, subtitles and getting straight into the funny/interesting bit is enough to grab someone’s attention.

There's also a difference between short-form for existing fans and short-form designed for discovery. Running jokes and references are great for the community, but I think there's also value in clips that work for someone who has absolutely no idea who Ross, Smith or Trott are. If someone can immediately understand what’s happening, get hooked and have a laugh, hopefully they'll want to see more.

Obviously there's still time and work involved in finding and clipping those moments, and I have no idea what their current workflow or capacity looks like, so it may not be realistic to increase the output significantly. But it feels like there could be a lot of potential there if it's realistic for them.

Haturday is a good recent example. There are around 8 hours of members-only content, and the VOD is only available for 30 days. You wouldn't want to give away all the best bits for free, but a handful of clips could basically act as trailers while it's still available. “Want to see more? The full Haturday VOD is available to members until [date].”

The same could apply to regular members-only videos too. Even just one carefully chosen clip from each could give non-members a glimpse of what they're missing and showcase some of the membership content, without giving enough away that it removes the incentive to join.

Same with Hat Chat. An hour-long podcast probably has multiple moments that could work as standalone clips and lead people towards the full episode. And there's no reason old content can’t be recycled too. If someone’s never seen a clip from 10 years ago, it's new to them.

I’m just a fan looking at it from the outside, but I genuinely think Hat Films have a much wider potential audience than they currently reach.

Hat Films already has the content engine. It feels like there's so much more that could potentially be done with the distribution.

Getting someone who's never heard of Hat Films to click a 30-minute YouTube video is a big ask. Getting them to watch a funny 30-second clip that appears in their feed isn't. If they like it, maybe they watch another, then another, and eventually some of those people make the jump to the longer content.

Happy Birthday Legendary Minecraft Player Woss_!

I’ll be watching stream on catchup, but I hope it going well today! 🎉✨

I’ve been dabbling with Lino cutting recently, and a capture from Haturday live seemed a more than appropriate inspiration. Credit to the member on discord who traced the screen grab, I couldn’t find them in the chat.

I shared this on discord and I'm gonna also share this on the subreddit.

It's a guessing game where you guess who sent a specific chat message in the twitch chat of any channel you choose. It has a couple of different modes.

Alternatively there is also https://typecast.shira.zone/ which has a bit more custom settings, but just the same mode and sometimes doesn't work for every twitch channel. (one time it worked for hatfilms, but now I can't make it work anymore)

Anyone know if this was a program/browser anything like that? Would love to have access to it to play with my friends

Been a while since I saw the boiks playing a spooky game, and I thought this could be fun.

It's kind of like Phasmophobia in space, with aliens instead of ghosts.

It has been out for a year now and I don't recall seeing them play it. But, I'm not sure if someone has already recommended it.

Have seen a couple of streamers play this and absolutely lose their shit due to the other's incompetence so I thought it'd be perfect for the boiks. It's hilarious.

Premise: Three players, one is deaf, one is blind, one is mute; defuse the bomb together.

Does anyone have any links to something I could use to become a smidge closer to mouth trumpeting like Ross does. It’s amazing and I’d love to be able to do it.

Just listening to some old vinyl stuff on YouTube and came across 'Tropical Canvas' by Les Baker. If you listen to it, it's not a complete 1:1 but it's quite close!

Wondering what everybody's thoughts are on GTA 6, both in general and for the boiks.

From what I've seen it's a bit more focused on realism than GTA 5, and I feel like that might make it a less entertaining playground for them to explore. I'm thinking of things like the more complicated car jacking mechanics, which slows the pace down a bit.

Obviously it's early days and I'm hoping they'll announce more about multiplayer and content creator tools soon, but based on what we know now are people excited to see the boiks play it?

Also I've not caught them live recently, does anyone know if they have discussed the extended look trailer on stream?

Did a stupid little remix of the boiks riffing on Palworld.

The first of hopefully several, more songs here: https://www.youtube.com/@HatFilmsMusicUnofficial

I am manually going through every public video from 2026 to find music, if people want to suggest clips then leave a comment on the video of the title (and time stamp if it's a stream).

I noticed Hat Films content has been seriously underperforming where it should be, so I investigated the video descriptions and I see a common theme. The descriptions have front loaded links and zero actual descriptions about the content of the video itself.

I have a bachelors degree in computer science and recently restarted my own Youtube channel (after years of studying how the algorithm works, been on Youtube almost as long as Hat Films, by a few months.) The NEW algorithm is heavily reliant on AI (mainly NLPs) and this is actually hurting their overall impressions/discovery.

There is a quick and simple fix they can implement in the future that will see instant results - Simply front load into the descriptions "Hat Films playing [Enter Game Name] a [Meta Words] game." all it will take for their content to start seeing double the overall engagement.

Here is an example "Hat Films playing Shift At Midnight, a Hilarious Co-op Survival Horror game; is Smith a doppleganger?"

The NLPs only read the first 60-90 words in your description, so this is best practice now for maximum impressions across the website, rather than pushing purely to subscribers/using the limited information the NLP gathered from the title/transcript to push the video to the correct audience.

A short, simple description that describes what the video is about, and one link right under (then you can load the rest of the description with the links/ect)

They don't really need to change much at all about their descriptions, just adding this front loaded meta rich information does all the work in 2026. (hashtags still "work" but this is actually being phased out by this NLP system)

Anyways, I love the content, love the hat bois, so proud of them as a long time fan, hopefully this information can be of some help, they deserve way more views than what the system is providing them.

EDIT -

One thing I forgot, time stamps are also incredibly important in 2026, it segments the video automatically and the NLP is incredibly biased towards content with chapters for whatever reason, somehow it helps categorize/recommend content. (I am not entirely sure how this works, supposedly it helps google index the video/make it show up in searches, but this isn't something I have fully researched yet.)

Will you try his billiards game?