Comment by Applejinx

I think they can be paid to do that, but I'm not sure quite how it was arranged.

That, or the Peterson pipeline is a good representation of a local maximum: a fairly obvious way a set of videos can direct people to related videos and increase the appetite for them. That'd produce algorithmic reinforcement without anybody getting paid. Apart from Youtube, content-agnostically hungering for being paid in views on their platform.

It could have sent a very strong signal that 'this content maximally sends a statistically significant number of viewers down MASSIVE youtube rabbitholes never to emerge, therefore take the gamble and try to show everyone the content, ???, profit!'