Youtube Shadow(half) banning videos (Please Read)

- sorry for the long post -

Ok bear with me on this, everyone's heard (and proven) that YouTube shadow bans comments for people on the naughty list. I was one of them for being an idiot and spamming, but after a month or so i'm now back in the good books, or so I thought!

Because there's one thing i've never heard anyone talking about, and that's youtube ghosting, shadow banning, or de ranking your videos once you have been caught doing something like spamming.

Now I bring this up, because it has happened to me!

I searched everywhere for a solution, have other people noticed it blah blah blah, but all I found was questions related to shadow banning comments, NEVER videos.

So it's time I asked the question for myself, Have you ever had, or noticed, a channels videos suddenly drop out of popularity? Only a few months ago I was a new channel, getting 20-100 views on all my videos with 0 SEO, 0 subscribers, and no quality or effort. Then I spent some time making good videos, got 50 subs or something, was gaining popularity fast (compared to my usual videos) I was up to about 100-500 views on each vid. But I wanted more subscribers to grow my channel even more, so I started stupidly spamming comments on small videos related to my niche , asking for sub 4 sub "cringe" looking back at it now it was so damn dumb. But it worked at the start, a few weeks in I had gained 500 subscribers from it, then I stopped because I realised the dangers (even though I didn't actually see anything bad happening to my videos at this point).

After that I had a few subscribers, put some effort into making great videos, and did effort into SEO. all my videos were at that stage getting 200-500 views, which I was pleased with.

BUT THEN

I noticed my a few of subscribers leaving (fair enough, they only wanted sub 4 sub anyway)
After a few weeks everything was calmed down, 0 activity in subscribers gained or lost. Then I went back to making genuine good videos, no spamming, pure effort, and started seeing decent enough results for a small channel. Making about 20+ subs a week, It was going well. Then one day I lost 15 subscribers in a matter of 2 minutes! Obviously this was youtube taking away some subscribers for my past behaviour. Then my videos lost even more popularity, about 50 of my subscribers were watching each one every day, but I was recieving absolutely no views from any other source (Youtube simply wasn't displaying my videos on search or anything) After that i stopped making videos for a few weeks, came back and even with still 50+ regular genuine subscribers who love my content, I am recieving next to no views from outside sources. Unless I livestream. Can't see any copyright strikers, no community guildine strikes, no notifications from youtube about it or anything, but now my videos are being pushed to the absolute back of the pile and after a few months of learning from my mistakes, no spamming, no bad behaviour, it looks like my channel is screwed. I tried paying for advertising on fiverr etc to get more genuine views and see if it helps, but nope.

Thanks for reading, if you have any info on this pleaseeeee help. Is there any time limit to this penalty? Is this permanent? have you had an issue like this in the past? please help me xD
I tried making a new channel but don't know anything about proxies blah blah blah so I guess they will just keep registering it to my same IP or stuff like that and all my accounts in the future might have the same problem.

Its normal thing with youtube. Nobody got answer about penalty time etc. But if you are serious about YT and want to stay in game for long time then forget about spamming.

I think it would be best to make a video about making a second channel and transferring your genuine subs there.. Then you can make a solid effort and grow

this might cause by community flagging your channel (video owners that didn't appreciate the comment spam) try to duplicate it forget about the subs, just re-use your content, on a fresh channel and see the results

Ofc, this is happening, you got subscribers (the fake ones) that don't click on your video or if they click they are not interested and retention is low, so youtube's algorithm stops your video from being recommended/featured, because even your fans don't watch it.

Here's what I can suggest be consistent with the videos If you will take a break your subscribers will forget you and also youtube wont suggest you anywhere thinking you are dead.

And Next you used Fiverr for advertising so you cannot expect very exciting results.
Now coming to the shadow ban you wont get a proper answer as its pretty new to the community and no one was able to tackle it properly.

don't look back, get a VM with fresh IP, create a new channel spin (use good spinner!) the videos and upload it, you don't have to do it all at once, stay away from bots and/or any automated tools, and you get a fresh start while saving your content that is now new to youtube and google, you might score better than before