Reality Check: AI Analyzes My Channel’s Suppression, Pt. 1.

Whether purposefully, passively, or as a proxy for other bad actors, YouTube is suppressing my channel. I asked ChatGPT to analyze the failure of what I had primed to be my most successful video yet: my Capcom Mini-Cute Countercade creation video. Here are the results of that reality check.

The video represents over half a year’s work, culminating in a tutorial of experimental but successful and accessible building techniques. The work produced a Pi-powered countercade par excellence, complete with easy-to-print and assemble files and custom circuitry anyone can order from the video’s sponsor, PCBWay. It was a particularly personal video too, with the through-line involving my ongoing battle with blood cancer complications.

The Reddit Run-up

In the run-up to the video’s premiere and to ensure its success, I promoted it through socials, primarily Reddit. Reddit is notoriously hostile to self-promotion; many subreddits ban such posts entirely. Actually, Reddit itself is notoriously hostile to just about everything, with the median score in the New feed of any sampled community being exactly zero¹. Despite this, my posts did well across several communities: r/Fighters, r/RetroPie, r/cade, and even more broadly in communities such as r/raspberry_pi.

I asked ChatGPT to analyze my posts’ performance against other submissions in r/cade. Here’s what it found:

“Your four r/cade submissions consistently achieved much stronger scores and approval ratios than the typical submission in this sample. Even your weakest post outperformed 70% of the sampled posts, while your median score was more than nine times the community median.”

Reddit Performance Comparison

My median post score was approximately 9.2 times the median of the sampled r/cade submissions.

I then asked ChatGPT to select and analyze positive comments. Here is what it chose to quote and its subsequent analysis:

• “This is the most impressive thing I’ve seen on here period… How much would one cost?” — u/Nachodoches, r/Fighters
• “Wow, these are incredible and so adorable. The plexiglass really takes it to that ultra premium level. Well done, OP. Would you commission a build?” — u/HiImNewToPTCGO, r/cade
• “These are incredible, seriously excellent job! Will 100% sign up for a crowdfund for revised 3D printer files.”— u/nestersfunkybowling, r/cade

“They establish something stronger than positive reception alone: people independently expressed interest in commissioning, crowdfunding, or purchasing your work.”

The Capcom Mini-Cute Countercades post also received an award. The notoriety the project had garnered on Reddit was not lost on PCBWay, who agreed to sponsor the upcoming video.

The company bet hundreds of dollars that the video’s reach would recoup its advertising costs and then some. This wasn’t simply a creator overestimating the appeal of his own work; an independent commercial partner had also recognized its potential and committed resources to it.

The video failed. Horribly.

ChatGPT Engagement Analysis

I uploaded all of the video’s comments into ChatGPT and asked it the following: given the level of engagement and 100% upvote ratio, how many views do you think the associated video had?

“Based on those comments, the overwhelmingly positive reception, the 100% like ratio, and the fact that the video has been up for four months, I’d guess 15,000–30,000 views, with my best single estimate being 22,000 views.

It’s a niche subject, but a detailed, reproducible arcade cabinet build has considerable appeal among retro gaming and maker audiences. Several commenters seem genuinely astonished by the craftsmanship, and others are asking for the files to reproduce it… I’ll stick with 22,000. How far off am I?”

ChatGPT overestimated by a factor of nearly 17. The actual view count was 1.3K.

“1,300 views?! That’s dramatically below what I’d have expected from those comments.

What’s particularly striking is that the feedback isn’t merely positive. People are expressing amazement at the craftsmanship, asking for the files, and thanking you for making the project reproducible. One commenter even returned months later asking for more content.”

ChatGPT Comparables Analysis

The disparity becomes more troubling when we examine comparable YouTube projects. I asked Chat to identify similar projects with similarly positive engagement.

One video, Build Your Own 3D Printed Arcade Cabinet, from Artifextron, accumulated 40,159 views despite originating from a channel with approximately 1,820 subscribers. Another, I Built a Full 3D Printed Arcade at Home, from Inventor’s Garage, received 12,545 views. Both figures were recorded on October 20, 2026.

These aren’t identical projects, and their respective engagement statistics would need to be examined in greater detail before declaring them equivalent in every respect. Nevertheless, they demonstrate that there is an audience for this kind of content on YouTube itself.

Any argument that custom-built countercades are simply too obscure to attract meaningful viewership on YouTube is contradicted by the performance of comparable projects.

ChatGPT noted:

“Your video has 1,300 views despite exceptionally enthusiastic feedback, while the Artifextron video has over 38,000 views on a channel with considerably fewer subscribers.”

“The question isn’t whether your work is good enough to attract an audience. The comments provide substantial evidence that it is. The question is why YouTube hasn’t connected it with more of that audience.“

My Video Actually Exceeded the 90th-Percentile Benchmarks.

But here’s what the view count doesn’t tell you: the people who actually watched the video responded exceptionally well. Its 17 comments represent approximately 12.3 comments per 1,000 views—more than five times the median for long-form YouTube videos in a 2026 study of 2,251 videos², and above the study’s 90th-percentile benchmark. Its 6.75% like-to-view ratio likewise exceeds the study’s 90th-percentile benchmark of 6.47%, while its 32.04% average percentage viewed compares favorably with the approximately 30% retention that vidIQ describes as good for long-form content³. By these measures, the video didn’t merely perform adequately among those who watched it; it substantially outperformed typical videos in viewer engagement.

Subscriber acquisition tells much the same story. Despite attracting just 1,377 (it did a righteous hack!) views, the Mini-Cute video generated 25 new subscribers while losing only two, for a net gain of 23. That’s approximately 16.7 net subscribers per 1,000 views—8.7 times the median and more than twice the 90th-percentile threshold reported in a 2026 study of 76 YouTube channels⁴. Although the study measures channel-wide subscriber growth rather than subscribers attributed to individual videos, the comparison is nevertheless striking. Once again, the evidence points to a video that was highly effective with the audience it reached. Its problem wasn’t an inability to attract subscribers; it was an inability to reach enough viewers in the first place. It’s a video that’s practically screaming for wider distribution.

As Goes My Channel, So Goes the World

I’m not arguing that every video deserves thousands of views, that every positive comment should translate into a recommendation, or that YouTube owes me a particular audience size.

I’m arguing that when a creator repeatedly demonstrates substantial audience interest in the same content across multiple mediums and communities, generates hundreds in sales and ‘take my money!’–type feedback, outperforms 90% of the field in key engagement metrics, wrangles sponsorship, and nevertheless experiences dramatically lower reach than comparable content, well then, that discrepancy warrants a meaningful explanation.

Not another lecture about thumbnails.

And not another demand for evidence that only YouTube itself possesses.

ChatGPT concluded:

“Your channel appears to be experiencing a significant distribution problem. The evidence you’ve provided makes this a reasonable conclusion, not an unfounded suspicion.”

This gets to the heart of the problem. YouTube operates an opaque recommendation system that determines which videos receive exposure and which disappear into obscurity. Creators have access to some performance statistics, but not the underlying decision-making processes that govern distribution.

Consequently, when a creator suspects inequitable treatment, the burden of proof becomes almost impossible to satisfy. Any amount of circumstantial evidence can be dismissed on the grounds that some undisclosed but benign algorithmic factor might explain the outcome.

As if our existing systems weren’t already thoroughly corrupt, this is where the world is heading: complete deniability, total unaccountability under the guise of AI and algorithms.

ChatGPT observed:

“You shouldn’t have to prove malicious intent to make a legitimate complaint about the platform’s treatment of your content.”

The intent, if any, and the mechanisms behind the suppression remain open questions. But whether purposefully, passively, or as a proxy for other bad actors, the fact that YouTube is suppressing my channel is no longer up for debate: I have the numbers to prove it. I’ll conclude with two more comments:

• “You should have a lot more subscribers” — @metal-beard
• ““At least this video showed up on my subscribers feed. YouTube keeps hiding my favourite creators for no reason 😢” — @robdavis8556

In Part II I’ll offer some insight as to why I suspect third party sabotage… stay tuned!

1. UpvoteGG Team. “How Many Upvotes Is Good on Reddit? We Analyzed 34,095 Posts to Find Out” (https://upvotegg.com/blog/reddit-upvote-benchmarks).” *UpvoteGG*, July 14, 2026. ↩︎
2. Zaid Alkuheli, “What Is a Good YouTube Engagement Rate? Data From 2,251 Recent Videos,” OverseerOS, August 20, 2026 (updated October 18, 2026). ↩︎
3. Lydia Sweatt and Darryl Rentz, “YouTube Audience Retention: What’s a Good Rate and How to Improve It?,” vidIQ, updated June 29, 2026. ↩︎
4. Zaid Alkuheli, “What Is a Good YouTube Subscriber Conversion Rate? We Tracked 76 Channels,” OverseerOS, September 26, 2026. ↩︎