You see this on Youtube as well. Comments acknowledge "The Algorithm", mentioning that the algorithm suddenly chose this video from 2013 to be popular, or that people who were picked by the algorithm to like this video must be cool. This has happened with music too, Plastic Love and Ryo Fukui's Scenery being some examples I noticed. Maybe it really is "the algorithm" right now but it seems like this could be easily manipulated.
Plastic Love doesn't quite serve your point, it's just they released the MV after literally decades, and nostalgia is handy for engagement.
Granted I do see that YT has the same issues. I don't think its easy to manipulate, but all recommendation systems are going to have people trying to manipulate it.
Plastic Love is pretty much the face of city pop/future funk and it blew up on youtube a few years ago. That crappy video they just released is a money grab.
Many channels I saw were inspired by SpiffingBrit's claims.
He claimed that creators using the Community tab was disproportionately rewarded by the recommendation algorithm. (Since the community tab was a new feature, YouTube wanted the feature to show up in peoples' feeds; but since few creators were using the community tab, it meant those that did got a big boost). -- IIRC, this evened out once everyone started using the feature.
SpiffingBrit also suggested that copy-pasting many of the trending keywords in comments would help the recommendation algorithm show the video. -- This turned out to be incorrect; but for about a week, most of the comments I saw in a bunch of videos had the same 300 words copied and pasted.
