The loneliness of the persecuted YouTube creator (and other lamentations)

Might I lay down my poor offering beside the nobility of Dylan's Mr. Jones? I don't know what else to do right now. I just topped 21,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel - a number the average hobbyist would likely envy - and my views are down to single digits, or not much better. That goes against the laws of physics, or at least against the laws of YouTube, the creators of which prize subscriber counts above all else - and which GUARANTEE huge views, or at least higher than the ones you got when you had 238 subscribers in Year One.

This is year 13 or so, and it's been a trip, as they say, but this trip may be over soon if things don't get a lot better. Right now, they look worse. With 3,000 videos in total, and all those subscribers, and past views in the thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands,  you'd think my current offerings would garner more than, say, ten.

But that's how it is.

I am convinced this isn't due to the plummeting quality of my videos, though some people have patted my hand and told me, dear, maybe you just don't realize it yet. I put more energy into them now than I ever used to, back when I effortlessly got thousands, or, at the very least, hundreds. 

The subject of the "algorithm" comes up every single day now, and I have no idea what it actually is, except that you must beguile it, flirt with it, suck its various appendages, and all that stuff, in order to get any kind of views at all. It's a robotic thing, like most of the narrators on YouTube (not to mention 99% of the images you see), but there's nothing "intelligent" about this AI garbage, as far as I can see. It is as prejudiced and prudish as any childless cat lady who steadfastly refuses to vote for Donald Trump. 

So why are the algorythmical baddies at YouKnowWhoTube beating up on me like this? Why have they turned off the tap and basically shut me out of my own channel?  It's in the video, but let me summarize: I've had a number of comments removed and notices pop up claiming I have been censored due to HATE SPEECH, HARASSMENT and CYBERBULLING. In no way, shape or form have I ever uttered anything like this, but I've had about half a dozen of them in recent months, each of them threatening me with termination if I make "any more comments like this" (like WHAT? They've already been deleted, so I have no idea what they actually said, let alone when, where, which video, etc.)

Though I realize the algorithm is a thing, not a person. I've tried, foolishly, to no avail, and KNOWING it will be to no avail, to get help for this. I've sent multiple messages to YouTube "feedback" (a ludicrous feature which is about as useful as writing a letter to the President of the Universe, folding it into an paper airplane, and dropping it off the World Trade Center - and the fact it no longer exists only boosts the level of futility). It's a way to get rid of complainers while appearing to listen to them, to "value their feedback" so they can Improve Their YouTube Experience.

In reality, they just want you to go away.

YouTube has changed beyond recognition just in the past few years, since the pandemic at least (and we now measure absolutely everything by whether it happened before the pandemic, during, or after - the first, and I hope last, time all of humanity has been united in such a wretched enterprise). It's all about commerce now, being monetized, including ads in your video which are actually presented by the creator/host (kind of like Arthur Godfrey inserting an ad for Lipton's Chicken Noodle Soup into his variety show, thus causing peals of laughter in the audience when he tasted the product and shuddered), etc. which I am not interested in. NOR do I think these slickly-produced, heavily-sponsored corporate offerings  are the only videos that get decent views nowadays. Every single day, I see videos, some 10 years old, some posted only yesterday, which are getting literally millions of views. LIKE THIS ONE.



This, too, is a ferociousgumby original, and every single day of my life it garners at least a few thousand more views, added to the 15+ MILLION it already has. I get multiple comments, some of them so gross I have to delete them, and I am not able to keep up with the 17,000+ comments I already have. I can't possibly read them all - so is THAT what they're so upset about? But they're not even my comments, so it can't be that.

So why did this happen?

THE ALGORITHM.

I guess.

It must be.

Why??

The algorithm decided to let this particularly awful and amateurish thing (which I threw up there several years ago after all of 15 minutes of effort) get into some sort of mysterious stream called RECOMMENDED. I have no other ideas on this. It doesn't happen, actually, but here it is anyway. 

As for my current offerings, which are of much better quality, I cannot think of a logical explanation for the crashing views which does not include YouTube threatening to terminate me for no reason at all. The nasty old algorithm, the childless cat lady of all time, has decided, NO, NO, NO, we are NOT going to recommend any of your videos from now on; NO, NO, NO, we are NOT going to send notifications to your 21,000 subscribers so that they know you've uploaded a new video. Naughty girl, bad Gumby, we're punishing you for being so ferocious (and is THAT the reason they're doing all this?) I have to censor every other word, no matter how mild, for fear of the final call, the last pop-up, the dreaded summons: COMMENT REMOVED!

This has stolen much of the joy I've had in 13 years of keeping the  channel fed and stoked with all the things I love best. OK then, I'm down but not out (yet), but the wretchedness of not being able to even look at my channel most days (dreading the sickening crash at getting 9 views when I used to get 9 million) is almost as disheartening as constantly telling myself I can find other satisfactions on YouTube, and even focus on all those oldies that are still raking in ridiculous views.  But I am sick of this bootstrapping, and I want ANSWERS.

No other creator that I have ever heard of has run into this. Most "small" channels have maybe a few thousand subs; some of them gain ten thousand views per video, easy. The math ain't mathin'. 21,000 subs isn't even a small channel any more, it's a medium-sized one. And it has taken me a huge chunk of my life to get here.

But there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about this. I've even written to a snail mail address in California, several times, while picturing it fluttering down out of the heavens and landing straight in the shredder. It's a joke, in other words, just a way of pretending to be listening. If this is truly the work of a robot, and the flow of my videos has been shut down permanently, I will have to limp along for - oh, I guess all eternity, or for however long I'm still alive. 

I'm still posting, but my heart ain't in it. I have literally hundreds of videos stockpiled, most of which won't see the light of day, but that's not the problem. I've always had far more material than I've ever needed - the opposite problem most creators face.

I feel like I need an ally, a human being preferably, someone who  knows how to fix this, but I am at the mercy of robotic forces now, squeezed dry by some vast corporate entity, like Charlie Chaplin caught in the cogs of the great machine in Modern Times.

I have one more thing to say, which maybe I should've said right off the top. YouTube isn't YouTube any more. Not sure it ever was, but increasingly, it has been taken over by Google. In other words, it's no bloody wonder my complaints fall on deaf ears. Trying to get a response out of Google is a ludicrous notion, because no human beings are involved in its operation at any level. It's all some sort of dystopian AI nightmare, everything artificial, manufactured, and devoid of any sense of humanity. But an entity with no conscience can easily become as nasty as HAL himself.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

UPDATE. I've been carrying on a wacky and very enjoyable thread in the comments section of one of my recent videos. The guy is crazy, posting quite bizarre parodies of songs, poems, etc. but it's the first time in months I've enjoyed any aspect of my recent channel activities, and I want to keep it going as long as I can. And I was having all sorts of fun with this - 

UNTIL.

Until I noticed that two of my comments no longer appeared on the thread. They had, apparently, been deleted.  As with all the comments I leave nowadays, I was extremely careful to re-word, re-spell, use substitutes, etc., though the comments themselves were about as neutral as they could be. One of them quoted the great Theophilus Marzials and his onomatopoeic masterpiece, A Tragedy. But the plops and flops may have struck YouTube as far too violent! And we can't have POETS in these comments. My God, what is YouTube coming to? Let's stick to vicious political rants and content so gross and offensive that it makes the paint peel off my office walls.

So must I tiptoe around All Go Rhythm for the rest of my life? Why am I seen as so dangerous, so subversive, so offensive, so violent, so abusive, so full of hate and cyberbullying and harassment that every other comment just has to be struck down as a matter of course?