The gist of many these sorts of videos, is to do a familiar activity but with steps that don’t make sense. This starts your brain’s little curiosity/real-time-explanation loop.

Like the videos of a guy lighting a firework, shoving it in a tube, filling the tube with a potatoes and then covering that with putty. They catch me for a few seconds every time, just slightly longer than a video that made sense would; and I think that extra second or two is all they need to jump up the algorithm’s ratings a little.