What's really happening on YouTube

+ Apple Watch ankle monitors, Power Rangers fanfic, a Shopify for filmmakers, Kai Cenat's 'streamer university,' and how Club Shay Shay took over the airwaves

A fascinating peek inside YouTube’s ecosystem

A few years ago, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a team of researchers came up with a new way to reliably survey trends on YouTube. They designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying b…