Say you have a channel about some tv show. Let's call it Pasta Warriors. You begin by reviewing episodes, making videos about world lore, theorizing about what future episodes may do, post some reaction videos each episode. One day you wake up and find you have 10,000 subscribers.
Now, maybe something happens in the show. Maybe they hire a a minority actor who ends up playing a terrible character, or the story lines start feeling contrived to make contemporary political points (Captain Linguini thinks Lt. Angelhair has an eating disorder, who knows). Whatever the case may be. A subset of viewers hate whatever's going on. If you, as a content creator, also dislike it - maybe even for completely valid reasons, maybe the story really is terrible and it's ruining a show you love - you find you got 15% more views for that video. You said you hated this, other people also hated it, boom. Validation of opinion.
So you go back and review as normal. Things aren't bad. You post positive or neutral reviews. Well, those videos don't do as well. You get fewer viewers. Fewer viewers is less money. So you start bashing the show a little. Your views uptick. You see in the comments people are calling things woke or DEI. So you, as a creator, now know if you also call things woke and DEI, you're going to get more eyeballs.
Next thing you know, you have 100,000 subscribers and most of your content is about how bad the show is because of wokeness.
Many creators - particularly young male ones - will go where the eyeballs guide them. And right now in some quarters of social media, there are a lot of young men highly engaged in spaces like Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok who will reward other young men who come aboard. It's incentivized. And once you give in to that, the algorithm tucks you away into that pocket universe to draw more young men in. And if your channel is popular enough to be one of the biggest destinations for the algorithm, you can grow exponentially.
Now here's the thing. What if you're not really "anti-woke"? What if you're just doing that because there's money in it. Well, you've just become part of the grifter class. And there are a lot of grifters on social media. People who say whatever gets the eyeballs, immaterial to whether or not it's their actual opinion. And with that call and response relationship between creator and viewer, it intensifies over time because they're just bouncing off each other in an endless pattern. Viewer to feel validation, creator for the cash.
I've seen it happen so. many. times.
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