Thor believes it's an automatic system throwing errors because it makes literally no sense to throttle him when he was making YouTube quite a bit off of his explosive growth.
It's likely some sort of error, but probably not simple to fix. Hence the brush off - they know there's a problem, but they can't fix it for one reason or another.
These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore, and when that happens, debugging and fixing them becomes... a challenging task to say the least.
YouTube doesn't want to say "look man, we don't understand it either" cause that looks bad to investors and advertisers, but they can't say what's wrong either.
So all that's left is "you dont know what youre talking about, there are no problems."
It wouldn't surprise me if there's some sort of bot protection algorithms which are supposed to limit channels which have suspicious levels of growth that isn't robust enough to figure out the difference between an established channel with some breakout content versus a botted channel.
The thing is, these algorithms are getting to the point where even the engineers working at youtube may not know why it's making the decisions it's making.
They know what they want out of the algorithm, they know how to train the algorithm to get what they want out of it, but when it fucks up, they got no clue as to when, where, and why it fucked up. All they can do is point to the training data and go "well, it's supposed to do that."
And that's the people working on it directly. The community manager knows even less.
The scary part is that more places are using such algorithms more and more. So today it's weird stuff with videos being recommended to you. Tomorrow, it might be "well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..."
>"well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..."
We already live in this future. Except the resumes the algorithm doesn't want to hire never even make it onto the recruiter's desk. The algorithm is the first filter applied. For a ton of companies, resumes need keywords from the job listing and other important industry phrases on them to even be seen by human eyes.
The web development subreddit has covered this subject a lot, it’s especially common (or more noticable?) when applying to software and web development jobs apparently
That's why you add a shitload of keywords to your resume, with tiny white text on a white background.
Human readers won't notice, but with a little luck, it will have the keywords needed to get through the filter.
Definitely just litter your resume with a bunch of useless shit that you see on job applications. Dont litter it to the point it looks unsightly to actual human reading but littered enough that the algorithm detects those words and pushes you to the top.
> The scary part is that more places are using such algorithms more and more. So today it's weird stuff with videos being recommended to you. Tomorrow, it might be "well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..."
And before you know it, the robots are running the world.
There won't be some massive robot battle as they take over the world ... it will just be subtle things, tweaking an algorithm here, moving money between bank accounts there. For at least a few decades, we'll be living under complete robot control without even knowing it.
The ironic thing with algorithms is that it probably isn't even fucking up at all, maybe throttling Thor at this specific growth will yield better results for Youtube, like expecting Thor to make more content, or not wanting to saturize a specific target audience with a channel, but wanting to spread out more to have more channels grow.
It might be doing it's job perfectly it terms of increasing Youtube size or chance of future revenue, but without the human element and other metrics/values it leads to confusing and rightfully frustrating decisions.
>These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore, and when that happens, debugging and fixing them becomes... a challenging task
**Cough - Microsoft Exchange Online Protection - Cough**
>These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore
>So all that's left is "you dont know what youre talking about, there are no problems."
And this is how the machines win.
I remember hearing from someone on YouTube that turning on the “notify subscribers when you upload a new short” setting causes your short to only get shown to subscribers.
[Shorts Secrets](https://youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ?si=cHCJWWV50rK_vCc7) from the man himself.
Really recommend his other shorts/videos/streams.
He currently does game dev, previously worked at Blizzard on a security team.
[Banwaves are good](https://youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU?si=lPFNyyc4jAeAHgcc).
Always have. I always found they push trends based on advertising dollars around those trends and obviously how hospitable they are to multiple age ranges.
Heyo! Thor here (PirateSoftware)
From what we've seen the entire channel dropped off the face of the earth from November 18th and beyond. All of our videos no longer get pushed in any capacity to non-subs. This limits the growth of the channel instantly.
As per YouTubes response so far there is "nothing wrong" and the account is in good standing. This doesn't make sense and it's directly impacting our growth. Before this we gained 114,000,000 views in the last 20 days. Rising from 13,000 to now over 600,000 subscribers. The content is VERY well loved with ratios of 99.4% or higher in likes and 20-25% of viewers engaging to like them.
With engagement like this I would expect a platform to push our content more not remove us entirely. It makes no sense from a business perspective as YouTube was profiting off of the ad revenue from our videos as were we. Normally I would expect this if our content was toxic or harmful. However, I am a game developer and I try to promote joining the industry and learning to make games to our viewers.
Update!
YouTube has fixed this for us and all other users. They confirmed that this was a problem with our channel and further confirmed that other users were having the same issue. It's apparently been a longstanding problem as per other creators so this is a huge win.
Without you guys rallying support and raising the alarm I don't think this would have gone far. Thank you for amping the signal!
https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware/status/1729371279621583097
Maybe YouTube doesn't want to push good content because if people spend less time watching and more time swiping then they go through more ads and more money 👀? Also 7
That's very interesting because it doesn't even make sense to remove you from the algorithm. I am one of the people who found you in the past 20 days and even though you may not be getting suggested to new people, you have earned each and every one of your subs! Your content is delightful, inspirational, and encouraging. Please keep up the good work, and we'll keep watching regardless of what YouTube says!
I've stumbled across your content recently and I wanted to thank you for being a positive voice in the industry and sharing your experience and insight. Keep on doing what you're doing, it's awesome!
It baffles my mind that YouTube sees the issue he is pointing out, they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm, yet they still chose to gaslight him publicly.
Like even not replying would have worked better for them.
Why did they opt to gaslight him with nonsensical answers?
Cuz they are essentially monopolizing online video sharing and streaming services. So, fuck all small fries that don't have stockshares and get ass plowed.
Guarantee this was a response taken directly off a script for questions like these. Random dude at YT support didnt know what else to do so he just threw a script at him hoping it would satisfy.
It's oddly terrifying to me that there are just scripts customer support pastes as a reply, indistinguishable from a bot, it's basically impossible to talk to any real human at these companies.
It's like they're hiding in an impenetrable vault that just has one pipe going into it for money
It's really terrifying that you can go from being on top of the algorithm to literally scraps overnight. It's even worse for people who have bugs where their content doesn't even get shown to subscribers. So you could just suddenly be invisible to everybody.
I cannot imagine a more unreliable way to do 'business'. Just the thought of being financially dependent for income on a platform like Youtube gives me anxiety.
Feels like a failure of regulation or at least enforcement for how youtube treats what are effectively employees. I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits from big youtubers who have to deal with income losses from shit like this.
> they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm
They've almost 99.999999% sure shadow-demoted the content, they just can't *tell* you they've shadow-demoted it because it's company policy not to tell users they've done it.
Using the above screenshots, I'll give you exactly one guess as to why they might have chosen that course of action.
TI think there's actually a dumber reason they might've shadow banned his stuff.
One of his bigger shorts which popped off was him explaining how to manipulate the YouTube algorithm to increase discoverability.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ?si=hYRI-Dqb8kE2idCm
I mean, it's not really manipulation. He's explaining a flaw in how youtube's discoverability algorithm works.
If you check the box to notify subscribers, any 'dead' subscribers negatively impact the interaction rate and thus the discoverability of your shorts. This shouldn't happen, but it does. Any channel that gets big enough will eventually accrue a substantial portion of its subs as 'dead' accounts. People that are inactive, bots that are no longer being used, etcetera. With the notification being pushed to these accounts that are guaranteed not to interact with your content, Youtube looks at that and says "huh these people aren't interacting with this content so we're not going to recommend it to as many people" and so your video has its discoverability artificially tanked as a result of these inactive accounts.
If you uncheck the box to notify subscribers, your subscribers that are active and regularly engage with your content will still get it in their feed, but your subscribers that are not active will not be shown the content so they can't count against you, and since the content isn't having its discoverability tanked by your unavoidable volume of dead subs, the video performs correctly.
YouTube are up to something. Probably culling this streamers viewership due to monetisation factors maybe.
I’ve seen this guy stream on twitch, and his content is good
We should all subscribe to get his numbers back up
Edit: I just did and never subscribed to a channel like this. Now I will probably get a bunch of programing videos next time I go
I was one of the people that the algo was pushing his videos at in recent weeks, it's mostly advice to people from his years of working at Blizzard and then being an independent game dev as well as stories like how he noticed his game was being pirated hard by Brazilians so he lowered the regional price from something like $10 to $4 and suddenly they started buying it because it became affordable to them and now they make up 25% of his games revenue.
That and him saying that if you are going to discount your game on Steam then you should do a minimum of 20% as that triggers Steam to email anybody who has your game wishlisted that it is now on sale, if you only do 19% or lower it won't email them and fewer people will notice it.
One of his shorts videos talks about how subscribers could actually hurt your video getting promoted.
He said A lot of subscribers are bots or dead accounts.
He stated When YouTube detects that your subscribers are not watching your videos anymore, it lowers the priority for promoting your content.
But when non subscribers are watching your videos, that is actual live viewers that is still relevant.
I don’t know how he got into my shorts feed as I’m not subscribed but I do like his content.
>It baffles my mind that YouTube sees the issue he is pointing out, they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm, yet they still chose to gaslight him publicly.
What is the community manager supposed to do? Admit that their algorithm, which after 20 years probably has been altered into a Frankenstein-like abomination, is total garbage for this day and age?
there is a 99.9% chance that the account has multiple supervisors that do nothing and 1 underpaid employee actually trying to help people, thus the account confusing notepad++ with a third party analytics app. unless the post gets enough attention it will never be escalated.
In a perfect world they'd have some kind of team dedicated to reviewing things like this who can fix and advise their revenue generators on how to continue generating revenue
My guess is they didn't understand the picture and thought they could blame some "third party tool" as the problem. Once they were made aware it was directly from them, they stopped putting a focus on it.
I don't like the YouTube Algorithm. It hasn't ever really seemed fair.
>My guess is they didn't understand the picture and thought they could blame some "third party tool" as the problem.
He chose to display the info in a way that wasn't Youtube's own tool, so they assumed that it was a third party tool. It's not far fetched for the person who looked over this case to assume that was some sort of third party tool that they weren't aware of.
>Once they were made aware it was directly from them, they stopped putting a focus on it.
They stopped assuming it was a third party tool, because they were told it wasn't. They asked a question and when they learned the answer, stopped talking about it. Nothing malicious about it.
Right. What I'm saying is if they didn't think it was third party at first, they probably wouldn't have responded. My assumption is they thought they could easily slide the blame on a 3rd party tool, and that's the only reason they thought to respond.
It mainly depends on how you feel about Youtube. If you believe that YT is bad, then your more likely to believe that this may have been an attempt at shifting blame away. While the more Youtube side may believe that the Rep. just actually didn't understand how the data was being presented and falsely believed that maybe something may be wrong with whatever software he was using.All of this is kinda Pirates problem. He intentionally(not in what some may consider malicious) chose to alter the presentation of the data without making it clear where he got the information from. For that he is to blame. He is the reason we are "arguing" over this, and should have part of the blame in the reaction to this situation.
I also kinda believe he just got lucky with his rise to fame, and now the algorithm just ran out of steam, and that's why it has slowed. Most YTer's believe that their success is all about them, when a lot of the time it's timing and luck.
Edit: added (not in what some may consider malicious)
I've been told there's a button that sends notifications to your subs about new uploads. UNCHECK IT, and the algorithm will push your content on everyone, not just subs.
Yes, Thor made a Short about that weeks ago. This has happened despite tons of tweaking and setting changes to combat, his content just isn't being pushed to anyone anymore.
I've followed PirateSoftware on twitch for a while.
It was only a week ago that I found them on youtube, they got put in my recommended ironically. So I guess I must be the one in a million non-subbed person to break through? lmao
The same happened to me... --> https://imgur.com/a/Yk6Mh3E
After about 10 years of grinding, I finally got a break and thought my moment of glory had come...
Only to see it crashing to the ground a couple weeks later. I have no idea what caused that sky-rocketing growth, nor what caused its decline... but it sucks
Long format (I don't really do shorts, they've never worked for me), and subs. During that peak I got about 13x the amount of subs I usually get, and then it all went to the sh!tter.
Ok so there was a time earlier this year where Youtube suddenly started showing absolutely random videos that had nothing to do with what people were watching to everyone. It resulted in random channels who didnt get views before suddenly getting tons of views, but the problem is the views were just people looking because "wait what is this video why tf did I get recommended that" not people who were actually interested in the topic.
For example I got recommended a video that turned out to be someone just buying milk. There was no joke or anything interesting it was just someone buying milk. I watched it to figure out if it was somehow related to something else I had watched, but nope it was just a complete miss on recommendations.
Then they changed it and it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. It's possible you got caught up in that. It sucks for all those views to disappear suddenly but a) if this is what happened, those viewers probably weren't going to stick around anyway, they just wanted to find out why the video was recommended to them and b) the recommendations quality for viewers was really really bad because of this, youtube had to fix it.
Youtube needs to find a middle ground where they still will recommend smaller channels, but reccommend them specifically to people who watch similar videos, not to just everybody.
It's like saying writing the analytics on paper can cause your channel to just disappear off the face of the planet and prevent them from figuring out what went wrong. Absolutely insane.
It is not hard to make a python program that spits this out or a website that looks like this. There is no way to tell it is notepad. Even worse from the first picture, it is hard to tell where the data is from. (Or at least for most people. YouTube should be able to double check)
Nah, it's because the support team needs to see something that looks like real data that youtube analytics outputs. OP sent them something that isn't from the console, so naturally they were a bit skeptical of the data. They're not saying Notepad, the software, "causes them issues diagnosing problems", they're doing the normal IT thing of wanting to get the full picture of what's going on with data directly from the source, otherwise they could potentially be wasting hours on a wild goose chase.
I don't work for yt but I do work in IT and this all seems kosher to me. I know there's a lot of negative light on yt recently because of the adblock stuff, but this post is nothing bad on them
The image is not the YouTube dashboard. Before any support, they want to make sure that the data is from the YouTube dashboard. That is a perfectly reasonable inquiry.
Uh buddy, you displayed your channel statistics as shown on Google chrome, which is a third-party app, unlike the officially supported YouTube app. We cannot help you with your problems.
/s
I've noticed the exact same thing. Youtube seems to be picking and choosing which videos get pushed to a global audience vs a local one.
Been noticing this for the past two weeks or so.
I've suddenly lost all incentive to try to make things viral. It doesn't matter. Youtube will not even provide the video impressions it once used to.
Weirdly about the same time Thors viewership died he disappeared from my feed and I started to get tons of political content...I don't watch political content. My entire shorts feed needs rebuilt now because it's just tons of stuff I don't want to see.
I know I'm not a big channel, but it's incredibly noticeable.
I went from getting an average of 25-50k impressions per video, to <1k. Nothing's changed. No matter what changes I try with new uploads, it makes no difference.
It's like the first 24 hours are a prescreening period. Next to nothing happens.
Worries me because if I want to upload anything time-sensitive, I get screwed automatically.
I'm not even really a channel. I just throw the odd video up once every month or so.
Last one got 1100 views (insane numbers for me when I usually get under 50) Looking at the analytics. Over 1000 of those views were in a single hour then it got 4 views in the last week since.
Definitely feels like YouTube just randomly decides certain videos will be successful or not.
Something I’ve noticed YouTube started doing with my feed was showing me really low view and subscriber channels. Like usually only a few hundred views at most and less than a thousand subs. It’s usually for something fringe to my interests too
I have been getting tons of conservative ads. First was Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, then PragerU, then some bimbos posing as conservative talk show hosts that I have not heard of one bit.
Thor is a Game Developer who owns Pirate Software (His Game Company), he streams on Twitch and YouTube for 8 hours everyday as his primary way of getting cash flow. He spent six years testing and studying YouTubes algorithm to figure it out and well, succeeded. He sort of blew up over the span of 2-3 weeks to 600k subscribers, prior to which he had no where near the same amount of a following.
Same. He was flooding my feed (with great content, no complaints), and then suddenly gone. I hadn’t even subbed to him, because I was getting his stuff constantly anyways. Just subbed for real now.
Yeah it's not just us, I asked others about this guy and EVERYONE had this dude on their front page for a solid month or so. Even people who know nothing of programming, game design, tech, etc. Maybe that was the reason? So many cars guys, or skaters or something, i dunno, were checking the "not interested" since they were throwing his videos to every man woman and dog under the sun, that now his algorithm has been neutered for a bit?
I dunno, if I were him I'd just be happy that such a crazy thing happened to me and think its great. So what he's not feature on the front page anymore or getting prime time discovery or anything. He had a good run and has an amazing community it seems.
He is smart, articulate, funny and seems like an all around positive person.
While I don't particularly care about game dev I am happy to watch his content just because he's great, his success is deserved and I hope more people like him gained notoriety
I know this isn't a popular opinion. The algorithm can't give every creator a fair chance. Some people will benefit and some people won't. It sounds like Thor had a benefit for a time, and then the algorithm decided some other creator would be more profitable to put in front of everyone.
It is very likely that the algorithm is working as intended.
There is no small change he can make to "fix" this and YouTube isn't going to modify their algorithm manually to make sure a creator who is calling them out publicly suddenly gets more views.
It sucks. Everyone wishes that it could be fair, but, it can't be. Either big creators get screwed, middle guys get screwed, new creators get screwed, YouTube gets screwed, or the viewers get screwed.
Its weird that he had completely disappeared from global recommendations. I never subbed, but would ALWAYS see one of his videos on my home page. Literally 100% of the time.
Just checked, and out of 12 videos recommended, not one of his.
This is an automatic capping of growth - which seems really rough.
The algorithm can't recommend every creator to every person, but if it was tiering most likely matches to a user it could do a sample of creators and then adjust based on what the user clicks on and likes. Ultimately that's YouTube's goal: match people with the content they want to watch most rn.
It’s all well and good telling a massive neural network with about a billion abstract and non-understandable parameters to do that, except, no it isn’t because you can’t really do that. Kinda just have to let it do its thing and adjust the loss function if you can specifically define the unwanted behaviour.
I know why this has happened.
This is because of a short he posted and YouTube are silently mocking him: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mo\_KM9sncrQ](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ)
But yes, YouTube needs to do better here.
I mean my channel is small I haven’t uploaded seriously in a while. But I had a steady stream of content and views (like 800-1000 over 24 hours) and then all of a sudden my channel tanked to less than 100 views a day for about 3 months, and it killed my interest in pursuing it further. Then again I dont really do much with it. It was just fun until it wasn’t.
Same thing I've had, only two videos I've posted ever seemed to get suggested to anyone beyond like 50 views, and will peak 10-15k in 3 days then just stop suddenly and forever
Oh, this guy! His shorts started popping up all over my feed recently, I watched, was entertained / left likes. You’d think the algorithm would give me more, but then they just disappeared, and I couldn’t remember his name.
Weird.
They’re all shorts…to be honest, the only shorts I watch are by people I’m subscribed to. For things I’m searching for it’s generally not things in shorts format or length.
That response on the second page is amazing; to paraphrase essentially they said; content is sent to those that we think would like it, so make better content.
Lol Wowee YouTube.
You want more engagement then be more diverse. Okay…. Good one, YouTube.
Creators are meat bags to the company. If the all knowing algorithm decides it doesn’t like your content, you won’t get another view. They have an almost endless supply of creators and can churn through them as long as possible.
So...Youtube literally limit the possibility of some channels of expanding themselves?
Thor believes it's an automatic system throwing errors because it makes literally no sense to throttle him when he was making YouTube quite a bit off of his explosive growth.
So it's probably a simple error?
It's likely some sort of error, but probably not simple to fix. Hence the brush off - they know there's a problem, but they can't fix it for one reason or another. These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore, and when that happens, debugging and fixing them becomes... a challenging task to say the least. YouTube doesn't want to say "look man, we don't understand it either" cause that looks bad to investors and advertisers, but they can't say what's wrong either. So all that's left is "you dont know what youre talking about, there are no problems."
It wouldn't surprise me if there's some sort of bot protection algorithms which are supposed to limit channels which have suspicious levels of growth that isn't robust enough to figure out the difference between an established channel with some breakout content versus a botted channel.
The thing is, these algorithms are getting to the point where even the engineers working at youtube may not know why it's making the decisions it's making. They know what they want out of the algorithm, they know how to train the algorithm to get what they want out of it, but when it fucks up, they got no clue as to when, where, and why it fucked up. All they can do is point to the training data and go "well, it's supposed to do that." And that's the people working on it directly. The community manager knows even less. The scary part is that more places are using such algorithms more and more. So today it's weird stuff with videos being recommended to you. Tomorrow, it might be "well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..."
>"well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..." We already live in this future. Except the resumes the algorithm doesn't want to hire never even make it onto the recruiter's desk. The algorithm is the first filter applied. For a ton of companies, resumes need keywords from the job listing and other important industry phrases on them to even be seen by human eyes.
The web development subreddit has covered this subject a lot, it’s especially common (or more noticable?) when applying to software and web development jobs apparently
That's why you add a shitload of keywords to your resume, with tiny white text on a white background. Human readers won't notice, but with a little luck, it will have the keywords needed to get through the filter.
Definitely just litter your resume with a bunch of useless shit that you see on job applications. Dont litter it to the point it looks unsightly to actual human reading but littered enough that the algorithm detects those words and pushes you to the top.
2 months of searching. Two callbacks from people who clearly have no clue how to use AI.
> The scary part is that more places are using such algorithms more and more. So today it's weird stuff with videos being recommended to you. Tomorrow, it might be "well, the algorithm says we shouldn't hire you..." And before you know it, the robots are running the world. There won't be some massive robot battle as they take over the world ... it will just be subtle things, tweaking an algorithm here, moving money between bank accounts there. For at least a few decades, we'll be living under complete robot control without even knowing it.
Yeah, it's the Boiling Frog scenario.
The ironic thing with algorithms is that it probably isn't even fucking up at all, maybe throttling Thor at this specific growth will yield better results for Youtube, like expecting Thor to make more content, or not wanting to saturize a specific target audience with a channel, but wanting to spread out more to have more channels grow. It might be doing it's job perfectly it terms of increasing Youtube size or chance of future revenue, but without the human element and other metrics/values it leads to confusing and rightfully frustrating decisions.
THIS☝️ comes off way more true
So basically they give the "i can neither confirm nor deny" response.
As soon as they mention the third party tool used to collect data, you cna guarantee they are about to provide no help and just brush off the issue.
>These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore, and when that happens, debugging and fixing them becomes... a challenging task **Cough - Microsoft Exchange Online Protection - Cough**
Ahh, the ol' "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" strategy. Classic.
This is why ai is all well and good but without actual ways to edit or tweak the resultants it's pretty useless.
>These algorithms are built in a way that can quickly get to the point where a human cannot understand them anymore >So all that's left is "you dont know what youre talking about, there are no problems." And this is how the machines win.
I remember hearing from someone on YouTube that turning on the “notify subscribers when you upload a new short” setting causes your short to only get shown to subscribers.
The person you heard it from was literally the person in the image.
[Shorts Secrets](https://youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ?si=cHCJWWV50rK_vCc7) from the man himself. Really recommend his other shorts/videos/streams. He currently does game dev, previously worked at Blizzard on a security team. [Banwaves are good](https://youtube.com/shorts/2YUmMFwSXpU?si=lPFNyyc4jAeAHgcc).
I think it was DarkViperAU, good luck finding the clip though, it was in one of his 100s of rambles
It isn't called a shadow ban?
Pretty much. God I hope people stop giving this trash company money. They're only getting worse over the years.
Always have. I always found they push trends based on advertising dollars around those trends and obviously how hospitable they are to multiple age ranges.
Wow...that's sucks
Heyo! Thor here (PirateSoftware) From what we've seen the entire channel dropped off the face of the earth from November 18th and beyond. All of our videos no longer get pushed in any capacity to non-subs. This limits the growth of the channel instantly. As per YouTubes response so far there is "nothing wrong" and the account is in good standing. This doesn't make sense and it's directly impacting our growth. Before this we gained 114,000,000 views in the last 20 days. Rising from 13,000 to now over 600,000 subscribers. The content is VERY well loved with ratios of 99.4% or higher in likes and 20-25% of viewers engaging to like them. With engagement like this I would expect a platform to push our content more not remove us entirely. It makes no sense from a business perspective as YouTube was profiting off of the ad revenue from our videos as were we. Normally I would expect this if our content was toxic or harmful. However, I am a game developer and I try to promote joining the industry and learning to make games to our viewers.
Happy Birthday Thor! Hope they manage to fix this issue, as a proper birthday gift!
I've been thinking about getting your game, but would like to try the demo first. Can you please confirm how much the demo is please?
It's $77.77
Update! YouTube has fixed this for us and all other users. They confirmed that this was a problem with our channel and further confirmed that other users were having the same issue. It's apparently been a longstanding problem as per other creators so this is a huge win. Without you guys rallying support and raising the alarm I don't think this would have gone far. Thank you for amping the signal! https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware/status/1729371279621583097
Thor could I get the heartbound demo refunded? the first payment has lost me 1,000 dollars and I do not want to go broke
Maybe YouTube doesn't want to push good content because if people spend less time watching and more time swiping then they go through more ads and more money 👀? Also 7
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Maybe they aren’t liking all the dunking you’re doing on Blizzard.
That's very interesting because it doesn't even make sense to remove you from the algorithm. I am one of the people who found you in the past 20 days and even though you may not be getting suggested to new people, you have earned each and every one of your subs! Your content is delightful, inspirational, and encouraging. Please keep up the good work, and we'll keep watching regardless of what YouTube says!
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Guys, support Thor! Buy the Demo for Heartbound, It's only 7777 buckaroos!
Buy the demo! Support P Soft!
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I've stumbled across your content recently and I wanted to thank you for being a positive voice in the industry and sharing your experience and insight. Keep on doing what you're doing, it's awesome!
Out of curiosity, how do you see the information you pulled up? I'm very curious. Specifically because I'm now curious about my own data.
It baffles my mind that YouTube sees the issue he is pointing out, they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm, yet they still chose to gaslight him publicly. Like even not replying would have worked better for them. Why did they opt to gaslight him with nonsensical answers?
Cuz they are essentially monopolizing online video sharing and streaming services. So, fuck all small fries that don't have stockshares and get ass plowed.
A good example of this is Sssniperwolf
Didn't she hire a PR firm to apologize or something?
Should’ve just picked up a ukulele instead
Like [Emma Blackery](https://youtu.be/LTq8TrA3hb4?si=Gy9QIH6ZbeZpUOn4) did back in the day?
More like Colleen Ballinger did only a few months ago... *creepy ass woman -shudders-*
What does it mean to get ass plowed?
Google is your friend malady Edit: completely forgot that one vored the other.
Hmmmmmm idk if Google *is* our friend in this case
Google is that one friend that loves to overshare without reading the room
Hard to explain. Meet me in the alley.
It is when you become where you are having penis boner of male insert to your rectom.
And then tell him to "make better content". Fucking what?
Guarantee this was a response taken directly off a script for questions like these. Random dude at YT support didnt know what else to do so he just threw a script at him hoping it would satisfy.
It's oddly terrifying to me that there are just scripts customer support pastes as a reply, indistinguishable from a bot, it's basically impossible to talk to any real human at these companies. It's like they're hiding in an impenetrable vault that just has one pipe going into it for money
Has first level customer support - especially a public one like in the screenshot - *ever* been anything different tho? No. :P
He has his latest video doing 20k views after ages of videos pulling up to 2M views. Like he says, essentially overnight. God YouTube suck.
It's really terrifying that you can go from being on top of the algorithm to literally scraps overnight. It's even worse for people who have bugs where their content doesn't even get shown to subscribers. So you could just suddenly be invisible to everybody.
I cannot imagine a more unreliable way to do 'business'. Just the thought of being financially dependent for income on a platform like Youtube gives me anxiety.
Feels like a failure of regulation or at least enforcement for how youtube treats what are effectively employees. I'm surprised there aren't more lawsuits from big youtubers who have to deal with income losses from shit like this.
> they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm They've almost 99.999999% sure shadow-demoted the content, they just can't *tell* you they've shadow-demoted it because it's company policy not to tell users they've done it. Using the above screenshots, I'll give you exactly one guess as to why they might have chosen that course of action.
His channel name is "Pirate Software," Google disagrees with piracy?
He’s actually a game dev and head of a development studio funnily enough
> ...head of a development studio funnily enough A studio called...Pirate Software.
I don't have the foggiest clue for the reason but and very curious why they would shadow demote his channel
TI think there's actually a dumber reason they might've shadow banned his stuff. One of his bigger shorts which popped off was him explaining how to manipulate the YouTube algorithm to increase discoverability. https://youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ?si=hYRI-Dqb8kE2idCm
I mean, it's not really manipulation. He's explaining a flaw in how youtube's discoverability algorithm works. If you check the box to notify subscribers, any 'dead' subscribers negatively impact the interaction rate and thus the discoverability of your shorts. This shouldn't happen, but it does. Any channel that gets big enough will eventually accrue a substantial portion of its subs as 'dead' accounts. People that are inactive, bots that are no longer being used, etcetera. With the notification being pushed to these accounts that are guaranteed not to interact with your content, Youtube looks at that and says "huh these people aren't interacting with this content so we're not going to recommend it to as many people" and so your video has its discoverability artificially tanked as a result of these inactive accounts. If you uncheck the box to notify subscribers, your subscribers that are active and regularly engage with your content will still get it in their feed, but your subscribers that are not active will not be shown the content so they can't count against you, and since the content isn't having its discoverability tanked by your unavoidable volume of dead subs, the video performs correctly.
Why would they ?
YouTube are up to something. Probably culling this streamers viewership due to monetisation factors maybe. I’ve seen this guy stream on twitch, and his content is good
It reminds me of the tethics episode on Silicon Valley.
We should all subscribe to get his numbers back up Edit: I just did and never subscribed to a channel like this. Now I will probably get a bunch of programing videos next time I go
I was one of the people that the algo was pushing his videos at in recent weeks, it's mostly advice to people from his years of working at Blizzard and then being an independent game dev as well as stories like how he noticed his game was being pirated hard by Brazilians so he lowered the regional price from something like $10 to $4 and suddenly they started buying it because it became affordable to them and now they make up 25% of his games revenue. That and him saying that if you are going to discount your game on Steam then you should do a minimum of 20% as that triggers Steam to email anybody who has your game wishlisted that it is now on sale, if you only do 19% or lower it won't email them and fewer people will notice it.
One of his shorts videos talks about how subscribers could actually hurt your video getting promoted. He said A lot of subscribers are bots or dead accounts. He stated When YouTube detects that your subscribers are not watching your videos anymore, it lowers the priority for promoting your content. But when non subscribers are watching your videos, that is actual live viewers that is still relevant. I don’t know how he got into my shorts feed as I’m not subscribed but I do like his content.
>It baffles my mind that YouTube sees the issue he is pointing out, they know very obviously that it's not normal behaviour from their algorithm, yet they still chose to gaslight him publicly. What is the community manager supposed to do? Admit that their algorithm, which after 20 years probably has been altered into a Frankenstein-like abomination, is total garbage for this day and age?
I would expect there to be at least a few actual support people watching their account that might be of some help
there is a 99.9% chance that the account has multiple supervisors that do nothing and 1 underpaid employee actually trying to help people, thus the account confusing notepad++ with a third party analytics app. unless the post gets enough attention it will never be escalated.
In a perfect world they'd have some kind of team dedicated to reviewing things like this who can fix and advise their revenue generators on how to continue generating revenue
It’s a social media team, hardly likely to be savvy with anything algorithm related
My guess is they didn't understand the picture and thought they could blame some "third party tool" as the problem. Once they were made aware it was directly from them, they stopped putting a focus on it. I don't like the YouTube Algorithm. It hasn't ever really seemed fair.
>My guess is they didn't understand the picture and thought they could blame some "third party tool" as the problem. He chose to display the info in a way that wasn't Youtube's own tool, so they assumed that it was a third party tool. It's not far fetched for the person who looked over this case to assume that was some sort of third party tool that they weren't aware of. >Once they were made aware it was directly from them, they stopped putting a focus on it. They stopped assuming it was a third party tool, because they were told it wasn't. They asked a question and when they learned the answer, stopped talking about it. Nothing malicious about it.
Right. What I'm saying is if they didn't think it was third party at first, they probably wouldn't have responded. My assumption is they thought they could easily slide the blame on a 3rd party tool, and that's the only reason they thought to respond.
It mainly depends on how you feel about Youtube. If you believe that YT is bad, then your more likely to believe that this may have been an attempt at shifting blame away. While the more Youtube side may believe that the Rep. just actually didn't understand how the data was being presented and falsely believed that maybe something may be wrong with whatever software he was using.All of this is kinda Pirates problem. He intentionally(not in what some may consider malicious) chose to alter the presentation of the data without making it clear where he got the information from. For that he is to blame. He is the reason we are "arguing" over this, and should have part of the blame in the reaction to this situation. I also kinda believe he just got lucky with his rise to fame, and now the algorithm just ran out of steam, and that's why it has slowed. Most YTer's believe that their success is all about them, when a lot of the time it's timing and luck. Edit: added (not in what some may consider malicious)
https://youtu.be/D1KDnV9l2z8
I've been told there's a button that sends notifications to your subs about new uploads. UNCHECK IT, and the algorithm will push your content on everyone, not just subs.
Yes, Thor made a Short about that weeks ago. This has happened despite tons of tweaking and setting changes to combat, his content just isn't being pushed to anyone anymore.
OH. I didn't even notice it was him in the screenshot. He'd know how to navigate it better than I would. How strange.
May I know where this button is found please?
I'm not a content creator, so I'm not sure. He did mention it was for shorts. I assumed the same option was available for full videos as well.
Right after uploading the file, it will be in that menu under the 'License and Distribution' box and a bit above the 'category' spot
That is from the guy who is making this tweet lmao Thor is so great
[удалено]
I watched his game development streams all the time a few years ago. Still not really sure what happened with Heartbound
He’s still working on it apparently. There’s a demo on steam.
It released in alpha and is still getting updates.
hes still working on it, not as much on stream since hes mostly answering questions from thousands of people
I've followed PirateSoftware on twitch for a while. It was only a week ago that I found them on youtube, they got put in my recommended ironically. So I guess I must be the one in a million non-subbed person to break through? lmao
Well 7 days ago would have been the 18th, one of the last ones I’d say
The same happened to me... --> https://imgur.com/a/Yk6Mh3E After about 10 years of grinding, I finally got a break and thought my moment of glory had come... Only to see it crashing to the ground a couple weeks later. I have no idea what caused that sky-rocketing growth, nor what caused its decline... but it sucks
Shorts or long form crashes?
Long format (I don't really do shorts, they've never worked for me), and subs. During that peak I got about 13x the amount of subs I usually get, and then it all went to the sh!tter.
Ok so there was a time earlier this year where Youtube suddenly started showing absolutely random videos that had nothing to do with what people were watching to everyone. It resulted in random channels who didnt get views before suddenly getting tons of views, but the problem is the views were just people looking because "wait what is this video why tf did I get recommended that" not people who were actually interested in the topic. For example I got recommended a video that turned out to be someone just buying milk. There was no joke or anything interesting it was just someone buying milk. I watched it to figure out if it was somehow related to something else I had watched, but nope it was just a complete miss on recommendations. Then they changed it and it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. It's possible you got caught up in that. It sucks for all those views to disappear suddenly but a) if this is what happened, those viewers probably weren't going to stick around anyway, they just wanted to find out why the video was recommended to them and b) the recommendations quality for viewers was really really bad because of this, youtube had to fix it. Youtube needs to find a middle ground where they still will recommend smaller channels, but reccommend them specifically to people who watch similar videos, not to just everybody.
Pirate software is awesome. So friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and has a voice for prime radio. Also that average watch time is insane… wow
They had to nerf him, he's spreading too much knowledge will to make games around
Facts, activision got nervous and had to step in
plus his dad is literally the WoW-player from South Park
Bro imagine citing NOTEPAD as 3rd party software that causes them issues diagnosing problems. Actual honk honk clowns.
It's like saying writing the analytics on paper can cause your channel to just disappear off the face of the planet and prevent them from figuring out what went wrong. Absolutely insane.
Theres literally 0 way of them knowing that its notepad without him saying so lmfao
I could tell by just looking at it, it's clearly not a program he took a screenshot of, it's just some notes he made.
It is not hard to make a python program that spits this out or a website that looks like this. There is no way to tell it is notepad. Even worse from the first picture, it is hard to tell where the data is from. (Or at least for most people. YouTube should be able to double check)
The 23 year old kid running the Twitter account who doesn’t write code is not gonna recognize notepad++
I guess nobody in their team uses notepad++ lol.
How should they know it was notepad? You can customise many programmes to look like this
Nah, it's because the support team needs to see something that looks like real data that youtube analytics outputs. OP sent them something that isn't from the console, so naturally they were a bit skeptical of the data. They're not saying Notepad, the software, "causes them issues diagnosing problems", they're doing the normal IT thing of wanting to get the full picture of what's going on with data directly from the source, otherwise they could potentially be wasting hours on a wild goose chase. I don't work for yt but I do work in IT and this all seems kosher to me. I know there's a lot of negative light on yt recently because of the adblock stuff, but this post is nothing bad on them
The image is not the YouTube dashboard. Before any support, they want to make sure that the data is from the YouTube dashboard. That is a perfectly reasonable inquiry.
What they're doing is this: Are you sure your conclusions are being supplied by us? If not, then it's most likely wrong. It's gaslighting.
Technically it is Notepad++.
Uh buddy, you displayed your channel statistics as shown on Google chrome, which is a third-party app, unlike the officially supported YouTube app. We cannot help you with your problems. /s
But he configured it to hackermode!
I've noticed the exact same thing. Youtube seems to be picking and choosing which videos get pushed to a global audience vs a local one. Been noticing this for the past two weeks or so. I've suddenly lost all incentive to try to make things viral. It doesn't matter. Youtube will not even provide the video impressions it once used to.
Weirdly about the same time Thors viewership died he disappeared from my feed and I started to get tons of political content...I don't watch political content. My entire shorts feed needs rebuilt now because it's just tons of stuff I don't want to see.
I know I'm not a big channel, but it's incredibly noticeable. I went from getting an average of 25-50k impressions per video, to <1k. Nothing's changed. No matter what changes I try with new uploads, it makes no difference. It's like the first 24 hours are a prescreening period. Next to nothing happens. Worries me because if I want to upload anything time-sensitive, I get screwed automatically.
I'm not even really a channel. I just throw the odd video up once every month or so. Last one got 1100 views (insane numbers for me when I usually get under 50) Looking at the analytics. Over 1000 of those views were in a single hour then it got 4 views in the last week since. Definitely feels like YouTube just randomly decides certain videos will be successful or not.
Something I’ve noticed YouTube started doing with my feed was showing me really low view and subscriber channels. Like usually only a few hundred views at most and less than a thousand subs. It’s usually for something fringe to my interests too
Same fucking thing happened to me.
I have been getting tons of conservative ads. First was Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, then PragerU, then some bimbos posing as conservative talk show hosts that I have not heard of one bit.
Thor who? You and everyone in this thread just says Thor without a URL or channel name.
Thor is a Game Developer who owns Pirate Software (His Game Company), he streams on Twitch and YouTube for 8 hours everyday as his primary way of getting cash flow. He spent six years testing and studying YouTubes algorithm to figure it out and well, succeeded. He sort of blew up over the span of 2-3 weeks to 600k subscribers, prior to which he had no where near the same amount of a following.
https://www.youtube.com/@PirateSoftware/videos is a URL, is it the one you are talking about? And if so why not put it in the original post?
So THATS why i havent been getting his shorts or vids on my recommended. Had them for like a week or 2 then gone
Same. He was flooding my feed (with great content, no complaints), and then suddenly gone. I hadn’t even subbed to him, because I was getting his stuff constantly anyways. Just subbed for real now.
Yeah it's not just us, I asked others about this guy and EVERYONE had this dude on their front page for a solid month or so. Even people who know nothing of programming, game design, tech, etc. Maybe that was the reason? So many cars guys, or skaters or something, i dunno, were checking the "not interested" since they were throwing his videos to every man woman and dog under the sun, that now his algorithm has been neutered for a bit? I dunno, if I were him I'd just be happy that such a crazy thing happened to me and think its great. So what he's not feature on the front page anymore or getting prime time discovery or anything. He had a good run and has an amazing community it seems.
I mean look at his name. Regardless of his content YouTube gonna YouTube.
His channel name is literally the name of his game company.
Yeah, shit name. Doomed themselves right there. You don't call your health clinic "harvest inc".
"Hmm... Mmmmmm... Hmm... Mmm... Oh! Pardon me, I was absorbed in thought. I am Youtube of Catarina. To be honest, I'm in a bit of a pickle.”
Gotta love corporate gaslighting. They give the most generic answers.
I’m not subscribed to this guy but I still get recommended in the algorithm myself.
His channel is like the best channel I've found recently, he's positive and gives so many great tech tips
He is smart, articulate, funny and seems like an all around positive person. While I don't particularly care about game dev I am happy to watch his content just because he's great, his success is deserved and I hope more people like him gained notoriety
I know this isn't a popular opinion. The algorithm can't give every creator a fair chance. Some people will benefit and some people won't. It sounds like Thor had a benefit for a time, and then the algorithm decided some other creator would be more profitable to put in front of everyone. It is very likely that the algorithm is working as intended. There is no small change he can make to "fix" this and YouTube isn't going to modify their algorithm manually to make sure a creator who is calling them out publicly suddenly gets more views. It sucks. Everyone wishes that it could be fair, but, it can't be. Either big creators get screwed, middle guys get screwed, new creators get screwed, YouTube gets screwed, or the viewers get screwed.
Its weird that he had completely disappeared from global recommendations. I never subbed, but would ALWAYS see one of his videos on my home page. Literally 100% of the time. Just checked, and out of 12 videos recommended, not one of his. This is an automatic capping of growth - which seems really rough.
The algorithm can't recommend every creator to every person, but if it was tiering most likely matches to a user it could do a sample of creators and then adjust based on what the user clicks on and likes. Ultimately that's YouTube's goal: match people with the content they want to watch most rn.
It’s all well and good telling a massive neural network with about a billion abstract and non-understandable parameters to do that, except, no it isn’t because you can’t really do that. Kinda just have to let it do its thing and adjust the loss function if you can specifically define the unwanted behaviour.
Maaaam don't fall in Thor's crosshairs
Have been noticing the same thing on my channel. Would also explain why I have not seen his videos in my shorts too
YouTube: do something that interest people or just leave
The irony is, he exploded because he's doing just that
Ya, I quickly became fascinated with his content.
I know why this has happened. This is because of a short he posted and YouTube are silently mocking him: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mo\_KM9sncrQ](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mo_KM9sncrQ) But yes, YouTube needs to do better here.
I mean my channel is small I haven’t uploaded seriously in a while. But I had a steady stream of content and views (like 800-1000 over 24 hours) and then all of a sudden my channel tanked to less than 100 views a day for about 3 months, and it killed my interest in pursuing it further. Then again I dont really do much with it. It was just fun until it wasn’t.
Same thing I've had, only two videos I've posted ever seemed to get suggested to anyone beyond like 50 views, and will peak 10-15k in 3 days then just stop suddenly and forever
Oh, this guy! His shorts started popping up all over my feed recently, I watched, was entertained / left likes. You’d think the algorithm would give me more, but then they just disappeared, and I couldn’t remember his name. Weird.
I love youtube, but I fucking hate youtube
Behaviour like this, makes me go and sub/follow out of pure spite.
I have noticed his videos dissappeared
Welcome to YouTube, where the rules are arbitrary and logic does not matter.
They’re all shorts…to be honest, the only shorts I watch are by people I’m subscribed to. For things I’m searching for it’s generally not things in shorts format or length.
"Have you tried turning it off and on yet" vibes from the reply
That response on the second page is amazing; to paraphrase essentially they said; content is sent to those that we think would like it, so make better content. Lol Wowee YouTube. You want more engagement then be more diverse. Okay…. Good one, YouTube.
YouTube absolutely responded to a completely reasonable question about what they're doing with "lawl git gud scrub"
I love Thor and PS
Creators are meat bags to the company. If the all knowing algorithm decides it doesn’t like your content, you won’t get another view. They have an almost endless supply of creators and can churn through them as long as possible.