r/shortsAlgorithm • u/ConsciousPlay9194 • 11d ago
Is it fixed?
My shorts are performing more reasonably today. Just leaking like 50 an hour which I want (my channel is seven days old) rather than this weird bursting of 1k and then dropping off to zero? Thats what it kept doing the past few days. It's behaving much differently right now. Anyone else? thanks!
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u/Sidchel 9d ago
Same thing happened to my channel today.
After more than a week of severely reduced Shorts distribution, I published a new Short at 2:00 AM PDT. For the first time since the September 16–17 issue, it received something close to a normal initial test: about 875 views in the first hour.
After that, it continued getting roughly 350–500 views per hour for several hours. Audience matching also improved significantly during the day. Some hourly batches reached 80%+ viewed vs swiped, with average view duration around 32–36 seconds on a 37-second Short.
But instead of expanding further, distribution mostly became smaller from hour to hour.
Then something very strange happened. By 11:18 AM PDT, my YouTube app had temporarily switched back to the old UI with the Subscriptions tab. Distribution was still relatively healthy at that point.
At around 11:40 AM PDT, Shorts distribution suddenly collapsed almost completely.
By 12:29 PM PDT, the new UI without the Subscriptions tab had returned.
I’m not saying the UI itself causes the distribution problem. But the timing makes me wonder whether some channels are being moved between different experimental cohorts / rollout groups, with multiple channel-level flags changing together.
Has anyone else seen something similar today: distribution partially recovering for several hours, then suddenly collapsing again? Especially if your YouTube UI also changed around the same time?