YouTube is suffering from a clickbait epidemic — and has been for years. A recent video, however, caught the attention of almost every major creator and the community-at-large, reigniting conversation about the growing problem.

The video was by content creator Carmie Sellitto, who goes by touchdalight on YouTube. Entitled “One Kill = One Clothing With My 13-Year-Old Sister,” the video shows Sellitto’s friend and fellow YouTuber, Millie T, removing an article of clothing if he gets a kill in the game. She’s in no way related to him, and she’s certainly not 13.

Sellitto has since removed the video.

It’s a lewd concept, but Sellitto isn’t the first YouTuber to play along with “strip Fortnite.” Much bigger YouTubers like RiceGum, who boasts more than 10 million subscribers, have been called out for producing similar videos. Sellitto isn’t a special case, he’s just another YouTuber who got caught for producing a never-ending series of clickbait titles and thumbnails.

Sellitto’s entire career is based on clickbait. He uses the 13-year-old sister trope often, makes references to starting fights with people that never really happen, and spent a portion of a video called “Reading My Brother’s Suicide Note” by asking people to “smash that thumbs up button 5,000 times.” Sellitto’s thumbnails and titles, which use clickbait tactics, represent a bigger problem than just one YouTuber looking to find success on the platform.

In a followup video to the controversy, Sellitto admitted he was using clickbait tactics as a way to become popular.

“I’m literally just a boy talking to my camera trying to make a few clickbait videos, trying to get my name out there,” Sellitto said. “My name’s kind of out there now, but probably not for a good reason ... My humor is so messed up to the point where I didn’t know where to stop, like I literally don’t have any limits to clickbait, clearly.”

The issue, as other YouTubers like Philip DeFranco pointed out, is that Sellitto is just a cog in the clickbait machine that drives YouTube. People in Sellitto’s community were leaving comments suggesting that if Logan Paul, the notorious YouTuber who came under fire for uploading a video that featured the body of a man who committed suicide, could survive on YouTube, so could Sellitto.

DeFranco said that if this is the bar people need to clear on YouTube for what is acceptable to get an audience’s attention, then maybe it’s time to address what YouTube has become.

“If the bar for what is wrong or right is showcasing and exploiting a dead body in your video, that’s kind of troubling to me,” DeFranco said. “As we’ve kind of seen over the past few years, you can be stupid, and disgusting and still thrive.”

It’s something that Casey Neistat has talked about in the past — and one of the reasons he alluded to in a previous video for wanting to quit daily vlogging in the first place.

“Clickbait titles, catchy thumbnails, and shareable content are necessary if this is something you want to do as a job,” Neistat said in 2016. “But not everyone wants that.”

YouTube’s algorithm is easy to game. It’s a system that rewards creators for figuring out what works, and then doing that same thing over and over again. On YouTube, it’s clickbait to the highest degree. As pop culture expert Joe Veix pointed out just this week, “Getting attention on social media platforms requires creating content designed to perform well within their ecosystems. Everything must contort to please the almighty Algorithmic Gods.”

It’s not like YouTube’s executives aren’t aware of the issues. Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s head of business and the man who oversees creators, spoke about trying to change the incentives for creators. The company wants creators to move away from salacious videos, tags and clickbait advertising, but Kyncl said they understand why creators are drawn to such marketing tactics.

“We’re thinking very deeply — and every single day — on how do we create the right incentives and disincentives for creators to do the right thing on YouTube,” Kyncl said. “That means a lot of different things. That means do the right thing for advertisers, do the right thing for their users, for the platform organically, and not chase sensationalism; not chase views for the sake of views, and not chase drama for the sake of views — and not use drama at our expense for the sake of views.”

Views are everything. The more views a YouTuber amasses, the more advertising revenue they earn and the more likely their subscriber base will grow. RiceGum spoke about clickbait issues on YouTube, and his ongoing “strip Fortnite” series just this week after he was called out by TSM_Myth, one of the biggest Fortnite players in the world and a popular Twitch streamer.

RiceGum was blunt in his assessment that if something works on YouTube and gets views, why shouldn’t he, or anyone else, repeat that format again and again?

“If the video didn’t do good, I would have just stopped it there, “ RiceGum said. “Just one strip Fortnite. But the video did so good that I had to do a part two. I had to do a part three. I had to do a part four. So that’s what I did, man.

“If I knew a certain type of video gets a stupid amount of views ... why would I not abuse it and keep pushing it out?”

Most of these videos are monetized, another facet of the clickbait epidemic that the community is upset about, but that only encourages people to do it again. PewDiePie, YouTube’s biggest creator, spoke about this in 2016. He summed up the phenomenon best, admitting the only way to keep a career going on YouTube was playing the game everyone else was.

“Clickbaiting, almost everyone does it,” he said. “If you don’t do it, you’re not going to get views. I can spend days on a video and it will get less views than a video that we shit out for 10 minutes that has a better title. YouTube is really unfair in that regard, and what it leads to is good content sometimes getting buried by ‘clickable’ content.”