But if it was allowed, view counts & popularity learning could be assigned to a completely different video that is uploaded as an "edit"

How is that different to just allowing editing of the video content itself?

They're saying you could upload a pirated episode of Game of Thrones, get 100k views, switch the content and title to "My Newest Vlog!", and keep the views.

How is that different from uploading half a pirated episode of Game of Thrones and replacing the other half with your newest vlog? People could try it, but I think they'd notice that lots of views can be a bad thing if most viewers react negatively.

If it happens anyway, view counts could be disaggregated into "total" and "since last update".

But you can do exactly that on your own website, and for some reason we don't have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs. Why would it be different on YouTube?

YouTube tracks views and other popularity / credibility statistics for videos. Your personal blog doesn't -- it's even easier to just put up "My Newest Vlog!" with a little number claiming to have 100,000 views. Why would you need to do a bait-and-switch?

> for some reason we don't have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs

I've seen a number of social network groups being sold for their audiences and then rebranded to sell questionable things. I've even seen something similar done to some YouTube channel I once subscribed to: its owner (new or not, can't really tell this time) changed its name/images/whatever, removed all the videos and started publishing things that I never wanted to be in my feed. Things will only get worse the moment YouTube allows to change videos under the same URL.

I'm led to believe this is also common on Reddit; someone (or a bot) will repost to karma farm, then the account with high karma is sold off. I'm not sure how much there is to gain from that since you don't see users' karma unless you specifically view their profile.

Reddit "trusts" accounts with high karma in various ways.

Scale and network effects.

I don't think it is different? I think even allowing edits to the video content would open up the door to replacing a video with something unrelated but retaining the views & popularity etc.

I think that's part of the problem. Does a new video, which may have nothing to do with the originial video, really deserve the views and popularity of the old video?