It feels like the way YouTube’s AI works never rewards commitment. The homepage shows you thumbnails from channels you’ve recently watched, but if you don’t click on three thumbnails suggested, the channel is never featured again on your homepage—until you manually go to the channel and click on a video.
This is even more vicious because the platform is designed to constantly suggest new creators. At the end of the day, the algorithm sends a clear message: creators are not important. YouTube users will keep using YouTube, keep discovering new channels over and over again, no matter if their favorite YouTuber just died. They won’t even notice.
You consume and immediately forget a channel you’ve just consumed, and you repeat that cycle endlessly. The AI never intends for you to stay committed to a channel. This way, YouTube can wipe out any big YouTuber they find too embarrassing, and no one is more important than the platform itself.
So I found myself never being suggested a video from Linus Tech Tips, Tech Source, or Ryukahr, despite watching all their videos and being a huge fan of their work.
I didn’t even notice. I just thought they were on holiday.
Maybe I scrolled too fast. Maybe their thumbnails appeared at an unappealing time (sometimes I come to the homepage to search, and I won’t click on a video if I’m not here to use YouTube for fun). Three unappealing thumbnails, and you fall into YouTube’s infinite void of VOD.
You quickly end up with thousands of subscriptions, thanks to how YouTube’s AI works, and even in your subscription tab, it becomes harder to find your favorite shows. This is why small channels struggle for views. You work ten times harder to build a community because you don’t have the same budget, the same benefits as big YouTubers, and YouTube constantly sabotages your hard work.
I’ve been on YouTube for a year now. I have 25,000 subscribers, but my average views are 25. My channel isn’t shadowbanned—if I didn’t have 25,000 subs, my videos wouldn’t even get three views (I did the experiment). My videos are simply not shown to my subscribers. That’s the conclusion of my study ■
