[InclinedPlane]

YouTube is not trying to provide a service to you, it's trying to sell you the ad consumer, to their actual customers: advertisers. And they have it in their head that the best way to do that is to increase engagement. And the algorithms they use to try to do that analyze the habits of the most "engaged" viewers which includes a fair helping of crazy people with unlimited time on their hands and when the platform thinks it has some sort of opening to turn you into one of those folks, it tries as hard as possible to shove you in that direction. All this is just silly algorithms under the hood without enough human oversight, but that doesn't make it any less sinister.

Imagine this translated to print media, imagine YouPaper: a publisher of magazines. Going by these same engagement metric driven algorithmic based systems such a platform would rapidly spiral toward pushing tabloid content to the detriment of everything else.