Wrong, the whole purpose of tracking your usage is to identify what kind of consumer you are so they can sell your views to advertisers. Recommendations are based on what category of consumer you’ve been identified as. Maintaining your viewership is secondary to the process of selling your views.

There’s also an entire industry around mass producing this content and deliberately gaming the algorithm.

It only must be extremely simplified and evoke emotional reactions. That’s just basic propaganda rules. The brainrot quality of the content is a consequence of the sheer quantity of the content. You can’t make that volume of content and without making fully automated ai slop.

What the experiment overlooks is that there are PR companies being paid to flood YouTube with rightwing content and are actively trying to game its algorithm. There simply isn’t a left-wing with the capital to manufacture that much content. No soros-bucks for ai minions in keffiyehs talking about medicare.