Since I was monetized, I've been using the freedom of not needing to micromanage the metrics, only doing what DEFINITELY works to do some experiments.

One thing I've always heard is that when a piece of content doesn't follow the typical format you got subscribers/views from, to uncheck the "notify subscribers" option when publishing, the reason being that if your subs don't click on it, YT takes that as algorithm poison and doesn't promote it in non-subscriber suggested videos.

I've found that regardless of how on-brand a Short is, they ALWAYS perform better when I uncheck the "notify subscribers" option and for subscribers, the only thing which changes is that it doesn't push a notification and doesn't show up in the subscriptions feed specifically. It will still be a suggested video on their home page.

By doing this for shorts, I'm not bothering my subscribers with clips of videos they've likely already seen AND it's pulling in an exponential number of views and subs.

Just thought I'd share.