With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing the smaller channels and helping people discover and share new creators. Hype is an entirely new promotional system inside of YouTube: there’s a new button for hyping a video, and the most-hyped videos will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard. It’s a bit like Trending, but it’s focused specifically on smaller channels and on what people specifically choose to recommend rather than just what they watch.
The actual mechanism behind Hype is pretty complicated. A video is only eligible to be hyped in the first seven days after it’s published, and of course, if it’s made by a channel with fewer than half a million subscribers. Each user only gets three hypes a week, and each hype is worth a certain number of points that inversely correlates to how many subscribers a given channel has. (The idea is that smaller channels should be able to hit the leaderboard, too, so each hype to a smaller channel will be worth more points — YouTube is doing an awful lot here to try and make sure the biggest channels don’t just dominate the leaderboard.) The 100 videos with the most total points hit the top of the leaderboard.
The problem I see with this mostly has to do with the fact that they do not have a good apparatus in place for detecting and blocking bots. There’s nothing stopping bot farms from hyping channels that fit the criteria. We already see this with comments on videos.