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.
Oh this is such a fun rabbit hole to go down and they all do it, they study the youtube algorithm and find out what keywords and categories will net them the most views. This extends not only to text but also to those stupid jump cuts they constantly use and really even youtubers who don't necessarily need them because they already have a large following are trying to squeeze out as many new users as they can out of the algorithm.
That's what the text and jump cuts as well as thumbnails are for, it's all total gibberish meant to get them to the tops of trending pages. Don't worry OP it's not just you noticing this, by the way, this is why I was reeeing so hard awhile back when the Fallout Amazon show came out, all of a sudden everyone and their mother were doing fallout memes and going "Ahahahah Fallout guys amiright?".
I fucking hate them, even the ones I generally like for their content piss me off when they do this. What's really noticeable is how the more long format youtubers who have real content don't need to rely on this kind of crappy algorithm chasing because they've got the viewer engagement and people actually watch their stuff for longer than 3 minutes.
By the way, fun fact this is why in my own content I keep mine under 2 minutes where possible because I know that people have the attention span of a goldfish these days, everyone does it sadly.
Edit: By the way, if you really want to know the kinds of lengths that youtubers will go in order to exploit the algorithm. Look at MrBeast and the recent videos on him, he uses gambling psychology to get young subscribers to bump him up in the algorithms. None of these youtubers realistically produce anything worthwhile, they just know the game and how it's played.