And in the music business - and probably also the movie business, and to some extent the writing business - there's been a strong subculture of payola and industrial promotion. The major labels hire pluggers - as they're known - who used to deal with radio DJs and now deal with playlist curators.

Sometimes money changes hands and marketable but otherwise not very interesting music suddenly appears on hundreds of playlists - in the hope that it will break through into mass appeal.

You can only push this so far because ultimately listeners still decide what's hot and what isn't. But they're forced to make their choices from a limited and crafted pool of suspected high-performing product, and not from a much wider pool of more varied styles and less homogenous artists.

Someone above brought up a very good point that YouTube really only has to do content reviews on videos that get watched. It's cheaper for YouTube for everyone to watch the same 30 videos than it is to spread those out, because then they have to brand safety reviews on each video.

There's also going to be pushback from creators (and especially large creators) when they find out that YouTube is adding backpressure to their success. It's going to mean the algo helps you get some level of popular, and then it fights you getting really popular.

> For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes

That author is misunderstanding the market. I know a lot of people who watch those; they have 0 intentions of actually cooking the things they see. To them it's closer to art than it is cooking, where they appreciate the end result and don't really care how the creator got there. I don't know why it doesn't seem obvious from the format. Those quick clips are an awful way to give cooking instructions, and they give none of the usual tips like "when you're done whipping, it should have the texture of...".

I think the style is inherited from Pinterest, where people constantly pin things they have no intention of actually doing. I had an ex that loved Pinterest, but her whole feed was pretty much just "Here's 1,000 things you don't have time to do unless you're a professional creator".