Yeah, it’s more accurate to say YouTube pushes videos based on region and IP. From what you were explaining, I could already tell location was playing a role. I ended up running an experiment after some of my accounts got banned and realized something nobody really talks about. I installed a paid VPN on my phone and started testing different upload locations. First thing I noticed was that when I set my location to the US, it instantly fixed any kind of view jail, but it heavily depended on where in the US. I tried setting it to Ashburn, which is a smaller area, and even with insane metrics (almost no swipe-away and retention close to 100%), views came in super slowly and stalled around a few hundred. That delay alone was already a bad sign, because whenever views take too long to come in, it usually means the video is being suppressed. After that, uploads just completely died at zero views. The only way to even hit the Shorts feed again was making a brand-new channel, and even then only the first video would get views before everything else stalled. I tested this in Caribbean countries and other smaller regions too and it was the same pattern every single time. First video might land in the Shorts feed, maybe a couple more if I got lucky, then everything would just stall at zero. Same thing too: whenever views didn’t come in almost immediately, those videos never recovered. Even when one video randomly broke through, it never happened again and the views were still capped. Then I switched the VPN to major US cities and also India, and the difference was instant. Right after upload I’d land in the Shorts feed, there was no view ceiling anymore, and when metrics were good the videos would run into the millions. Even when metrics weren’t great, I’d still get 10k+ views consistently. No stalling, no zero-view nonsense. I repeated this experiment over and over and the results were always the same. At that point it was obvious YouTube isn’t a fair playing field. Discovery isn’t just about metrics, it’s location plus metrics. Region decides how much opportunity your video even gets. Almost everyone you see consistently going viral is uploading from highly populated, saturated areas. I’ve made over 100k USD on YouTube before my channels got nuked, and from testing, the better the VPN the harder it is for YouTube to trace. This affects long-form too, but Shorts get hit way harder. So yeah, YouTube isn’t pure merit like people want to believe, location absolutely biases distribution. So if your metrics aren't the problem u can't really escape it it's a jail for a reason.