I think your posts must just show up in the sort if your instance is federated with ours. I found this in m/random on Kbin. I just came to see if the spam was gone and I could unblock. This post was number 6 under hot. If I had to guess, the number of comments probably pushed it up. The posts around it have more upvotes but less comments.

So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.

The strange thing to me is how much the Youtube search results and suggestions have changed, even just in the last few months. I mostly go there to listen to music and I used to get stuff I was actually interested in.

Yesterday I went looking for a specific video. Of the top 15 results, only 2 were close to what I wanted. It wasn't even the top 2. One relevant result, then a bunch of political clickbait. Zero connection to music. And the autoplay will feed you the same thing if it's on.

A couple weeks ago, YouTube was still giving me a whopping 3 relevant results at the top before turning on the BS algorithm hose.