You start out a conspiracy with trolling and people doing it for the lulz and the reactions, and eventually you end up drawing in the unstable and mentally ill as true believers.
Which can lead to unpleasant outcomes, like pizzagate or Qanon.
That explains quite a bit. So many of us thought that the internet was going to change society for the better. Instead, society changed the internet for the worse.
Utopian visions always have the problem of dealing with the humans that we have, not the humans that we wish we had.
Now that we can see ourselves at a scale we've never been able, we have an opportunity to make adjustments at scale, which is a process that takes generations.
So I wonder what role YouTube monetization plays in this. How much money can you make grifting the gullible off of YouTube ads? As for q-anon, there's plenty of characters straight up selling merchandise, which should clue you in to what kind of operation it actually is.
It wasn't that long ago that YouTube decided to de-monetize all antivaxx videos. Has that had a noticeable outcome? If amoral grifters can't make money peddling bullshit ideas, do they do it less? Are there fewer antivaxx videos being made today, than a year ago? Are fewer people being sucked into that particular conspiracy bullshit today, than a year ago?
That's a new one. Besides, isn't this how science is supposed to work? Improving accuracy, discarding what doesn't work?
Also, while it's true that "troll" gets used too lightly sometimes, it's also true that a high percentage of those who like to point it out just don't want to examine their own genuinely troll-ish behavior. Examples of "telling hard truths" and "consider all sides" and "devil's advocate" abound here.