Results of My Month-Long Experiment of Not Sharing Videos on Social Media

In the just-past month of October, I experimented with not sharing my videos on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. The results of my experiment contained some things to be expected and some surprises.
The big, obvious effect was that I had fewer views on my channel, which was a disappointment, but I also expected it. Overall, number of views and watch time were both down by about 16%. This sent me the message that sharing my videos on social media DID make a substantial difference for my channel, perhaps a bit more than I realized, because some of the effects may have been indirect.
The other result though was that it freed up a huge amount of free time, a lot more than I had expected. With this extra time, I was able to record more videos, including some fairly involved ones (I recorded 13 videos in October, compared to 8 in July and 9 in August) and in spite of doing this extra work, I still found I was spending a lot more time on my channel.
I also noticed that the engagement-per-view on my video was WAAAY higher, showing that the viewers who stuck around were more dedicated. I had a (local) record number of thumbs up on one video, which got 10 thumbs ups in spite of me putting no energy into promoting it, and this was record engagement PER number of view. And in spite of publishing videos on some highly controversial topics, I got not a single thumbs-down during the entire month.
Going forward, I plan and hope to get the "best of both words" so to speak, by continuing to post my videos to social media, but putting less time and energy into doing it. This means I'll probably continue to share the videos to Facebook and other sites, but that I will put less energy into writing descriptions, probably just using the default descriptions, and that I will engage less with the dialogue on these media, instead encouraging people to come to my channel and comment there.