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.
If dishonest money wasn't satisfying, the world wouldn't have thousands of MLM/pyramid schemes thriving, salesmen would have all killed themselves, and every job title involving producer/executive would have given up after just a few checks.
And "content creator" is one of those jobs that requires it. They all dress it up with the world "algorithm" but its the same thing every time. They are forced to play a game of deceit and manipulation to minimize "click through" ratios and "force engagement."
If they don't, there are 900000 more ready to do it happily and Youtube/Tiktok/Whatever is litered with dead accounts with 300+ videos with a combined total of 14 views who didn't participate in it. And channels with 1m+ subs getting 10k views who stopped playing the game sufficiently enough.