Death by algorithm

It's inconsistently applied, there's no appeal, but it's cheap and you don't have to hire human moderators... And Google does love things that have global scale, so even if it's wrong, is it wrong enough for Google to care? No not at all

The fact that there's no feedback to the video owner is an indictment of the whole process.

I genuinely believe Shadow banning should be antithetical to social media. Maybe even against the law. The most cogent argument I've heard in defense of shadow banning is, if people know their shadow banned, they'll try to avoid the ban... This argument is the same as gaslighting, we think it's better to gaslight people than to argue with them about the truth.

Aww I feel bad for SungWon but I'm glad he has covered the slow and steady demise of YouTube one step at a time. He should do a whole history of the reddit, twitter, other social media's enshittifications as a series of his skits.

The search sucks even if videos aren't falsely flagged & hidden. You constantly have to wade through completely unrelated videos that have nothing to do with the search term (and nowadays also a bunch of spammy Shorts that just tag all trending shit), before you actually reach the videos you're actually looking for. In the past you were able to use quotation marks to explicitly search only for the search terms between them, and nothing else, but that feature got quietly canned a while ago.

Google is beyond a dictatorship at this point.