The creator Marques Brownlee this week urged YouTube’s makers not to use a feature the platform is about to ship that lets them publish several variants of the same video and see which one performs best.

In a video essay called Dear YouTube, released this week, Mr. Brownlee laid out questions he said no one at YouTube has answered: whether a viewer can know a video is part of such a test, how commenters can be sure they are reacting to the same footage, and how timestamps in shared links are supposed to work. He said he asked YouTube engineers directly, and in his telling they had no real reply: “We don’t know — yolo! This’ll ship soon.”

His plea to creators, he said, comes down to what YouTube is for. “There’s this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we’re all having this same experience together — we’re all watching the same video,” Mr. Brownlee said. “That is what makes it a cultural phenomenon is that we all saw the same thing.” Letting people put up two or three versions of one video at once “kind of fundamentally breaks that, which doesn’t feel right.”

The argument found a reader this week in Jim Nielsen, who wrote about the video on his blog: “I agree, 100%.” Mr. Nielsen carried Mr. Brownlee’s points past YouTube, into the making of software generally. The skill of being a creator, he said, is not maximizing views or retention but sharing stories, teaching concepts and exploring ideas; the numbers come after. Making and finishing many things serves a maker better than making one thing and obsessing over variants of it. And chasing metrics trims out the creative parts, because they don’t, as he put it, “ladder up to metrics of efficiency.” Moby Dick was not the most efficient way to tell that story.

His advice to makers of any kind: stand by your creative choices, learn from what works and what fails, and make the next thing. “Have some conviction.”

Mr. Nielsen also connected the feature to YouTube itself. Mr. Brownlee argues that the company spends too much time chasing its competitors and not enough, in his words, being YouTube. Letting users endlessly test variations, Mr. Nielsen wrote, is what you get from a platform unsure of what it wants to be — “this adolescent attitude of, ‘I don’t know what I want to be, so I’m gonna imitate my peers and let others tell me what they think I should be.’”

His last line doubled as the worry: “Hopefully you see the same thing I did, lol.”