If you're like me, you lack the self control to not occasionally click on a Youtube short despite them always being just lowest denominator junk. Or if it's twitter sometimes they'll be TikToks. One thing I noticed is all or almost all of them have text saying what the person said, but also that they will have a blatant error of the text not matching what the person said. Not just a minor spelling error, but a completely different word.
For instance this one https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g4tVsh1auDY
where the guy says "they should be under the jail" and the text says "out of the jail". I noticed they all do this. I first chocked it up to an illiterate and uneducated generation, but then I realized the tactic.
If the Youtube short has 2000 comments, I bet you like 300 of those comments are correcting that word "mistake". So that's 300 free comments to boost engagement.
These are the types of tactics that I don't know how these "content creators" sleep at night. It's so dishonest. Dishonest money can't be satisfying. I'm far on the personality type where doing anything dishonest or snake-oily is like a thing that makes me feel sick. I have plenty of faults, but lack of integrity or dishonesty isn't really one of them. I'm probably more rigid than even the average person in this area, so it's something that especially gets under my skin.
Unhook can block various elements. I have mine set up to block the sidebar, homepage, recommendations, and such entirely.
And Youtube-shorts block redirects any short you do click on, into the normal format.
Oooh, clever. Never thought of that.
I'm mixed. I wouldn't do it - I'm too much of a perfectionist, I'd want my content to be to best of my ability - but I also think I could sleep at night if I were to utilize such tactics. Almost everyone understands what was said, so it's not really harming that much. And everything is so gamified it's hard to blame people for playing the system. Hate the game, not the player, as they say.
If anything, YouTube/TikTok/social media is to blame for incentivizing such weirdness. If you're a "content creator" and it's your job, it would be kind of silly to leave money on the table. You want, you need that engagement.
So, yeah, I don't like this - especially intentionally making your content less good - but I understand it. "The Algorithm" is an evil beast, and harming society in many different ways.