I've always wondered why my 6 hour old packs are getting featured on the popular reel even when they barely reached any meaningful milestones. I first thought it was to give my packs an initial boost of views, but that doesn't seem to work as intended. I even considered trying to figure out a strategy to find the optimal time to post and get the most out of the reel time, and the only logical solution I could think of was to stay up till 4am to post. (My time zone is UTC+9.)
Another thing I want to point out is the amount of YouTube video coverage datapacks get compared to mods. Take
AsianHalfSquat or
Boodlyneck for example. They are still showcasing new and interesting mods to this day, but never have I seen them say a word about datapacks. When I search "Minecraft Datapack on YouTube, the latest one I can find is from 2 weeks ago and others being 5 months, 10 months, or more than a year.
Although mods have been in the game for far longer, considering how datapacks were added in
17w43a, released on October 25th, 2017, with the proper promotion system, I'm sure that datapacks could've at least gotten twice as more coverage than what we get right now, but sadly, the only datapacks featured consistantly are "Minecraft But..." style challenges or ones featured in HermitCraft. Maybe Cursforge has a good strat on promoting mods in an efficient way, but considering how they named datapacks as "customization," I can't expect people to switch over to Curse.
Overall, other than PMC doing good at calling datapacks datapacks, the rest of the system is questionable and it really discourages both the creators and the YouTubers who have to rumage through low quality packs to find a gem. I guess the popular reel is kind of their attempt to fix this, but I'd firmly say that that failed miserably.
