It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on.<p>The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come with being an "influencer")<p>Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth? Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it <i>too obvious</i> that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example, claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show brought him back for a few more segments.<p>Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason, people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio, and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.