I find it interesting people end up making passive income by cheating in the beginning such as people buying followers/subscribers for youtube and later on they start to trend with actual real viewers.
So back then there was issues with YouTube platform and cheaters. Now that Google has taken a hold of the code and revamped it, they eliminated most botting.

However they just made subscribers not matter for the trending page, it's now a selective stock of trending content and the rest of random content is pulled based on what you watch or seen.

AT the end of the day the centralization of ad serving on YouTube platform is based on CPM and false impressions can lead you to being suspended from the program.

And thanks to political ideologies cracking down and accusing Google of not taking charge and censor those who are a bit on the edge of the political scale.

Instead of being a community based open ended community it's a walking on egg shells platform, anything you say can get you kicked out of the program, No more mature content that generates passive income.

Instead YouTubers are being punished at the top level which is good because you cannot just let those in top get away with breaking some rules, while the smaller content creators get punished harsher due to the higher requirements to have passive income while YouTube content still plays ads on your videos unless they are listed as "creative commons" even then it's plausible for YouTube to slap a few ads on the side or something.

However we have to understand it isn't our own platform it is paid for and the infrastructure is expensive and data storage and the many cdns that serve you content so the video you stream isn't lagging for you. However the changes of the platform has finally hit the top youtubers.

And they realized it affects what it meant to be a youtuber even if you were just a person with less than 1k subscribers you still mattered back then. Now it's almost impossible to hit the trending page due to being a smaller youtuber because YouTube serves the Mainstream media market.

The Movie Industry, The Music Industry, Corporate interests are all paying advertisement to get their videos trending. It makes sense from a commericial aspect. But you see how commericialized YouTube has become it is no longer a community for regular content creators but professional commericial content creators.

And those who are randomly chosen get lucky to be on the top but it's easy to lose your spot. Due to the competition with older YouTubers who have higher amounts of legitimate subscribers. But at the end of the day something is funny.

Due to the controversial content people create such as covering school shootings or other topics that are on touchy subjects. People have been demonetized or even had their videos deleted and account suspended. And the newer program called "Trusted Flaggers" something of that nature.

So there does remain a human error into the factor of flagging videos that may not even be inapproriate or rule breaking. It's easy to assume that we have trusted flaggers from the community but they are humans and can have a vendetta against certain topics or belief systems and instead of coming from a neutral stance they can easily choose to come at it from a pre-judgement stance on certain subjects. The fairness and balance is very hard to obtain.

Human nature leads us to human error which leads us to have our own judgemental faults when it comes to dealing with the World. We may not all agree with each other but we can agree to disagree or at least attempt? When we free ourselves from hate we find ourselves in Love and Peace. I do hope that as a humanity we can build a great community in social media, And we can co-exist to be at peace amongst each other.