If only YouTube had some social mechanics like dislikes, where you can mark a video as 'bad' so users would see that far more people disliked this video than liked, so it is likely not very good and you shouldn't waste your time. ...
What if the content is good, but the titles and thumbnails are just annoying?
...and not because the creators want to make clickbait titles and OTT thumbnails, but because that's what everyone else clicks on, and is therefore what The Algorithm boosts, so that's what they all need to chase.
Incentives are misaligned here. Regardless of reporting, YouTube will likely continue to prioritize engaging title/thumbnail combinations because they prioritize engagement.
A third-party database that provides descriptive titles does not have this incentive, but instead benefits from being qualitatively distinct from the OG YouTube experience. (Otherwise, why would people use the extension?)
Not exactly. It did exist, and creators can see the actual count, but otherwise the dislike count isn’t sent by the API anymore. What’s actually going on is those browser plugins are recording the number of dislikes themselves and inferring the number.
I spend most of my time on youtube asking it to "not recommend this channel". But even youtube is decreasing in quality theses days, regarding recommendations. God forbid if I search for something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic.
I added a whole bunch of stuff to Watch Later last week because, obvs., I wanted to watch them later. Since then, those exact same videos have been front and centre every day in the "FOR YOU" list. I mean, well done, I guess, for thinking I might want to watch videos I've specifically indicated I want to watch?
This infuriates me. I know the video exists, that’s why it’s on my watch later.
It’s like adding an item to your cart, and then having an ad for it at the top of every search result.
Another thing I hate is if you watch a video from a playlist (or the “podcasts” tab on a channel), and go into your watch history to continue the video, you can’t. It just shows a link to the entire playlist
I on the other hand wish it would do that more often.
When I open YouTube I’m always distracted by the recommendations on the initial screen, and then I never get around to the Watch Later list. So it’s nice when Watch Later videos show up on the initial screen.
I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos on the initial screen rather than doing so seemingly at random.
> I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos
I would be 100% A-OK with that if it had its own section. Like there's a "News" section if I scroll down a few rows. Put "You wanted to watch these later" down there as well. Absolutely do not put them in suggestions though.
One rationale could be that people commonly fill up their "Watch Later" lists with hundreds of videos which they do find interesting, but ultimately forget about and never watch.
Yep, definitely because I'm doing the same. But don't put them in the "recommended" section - I've already accepted that I want to watch them! Put them in their own "You may have forgotten..." section.
Hey, YouTube is only trying to be helpful! It knows that a half-life of a video is about 5 years - every YT video will eventually decay into error message, via one of many phenomena identified by experimental SaaSysicists, such as "geo-block decay" (and its special form, "Germany block decay"), "spontaneous demonetization", "spurious content-ID block", "channel-ban induced cascade", or "Decay Measurement Cascade Anomaly" aka. "DMCA". So it really just wants to make sure you'll watch the video before it's too late!
Have you considered that the first sentence might be the cause of the second and third?
It seems to me that if you spend all your time telling YouTube its recommendations are bad, it can only respond by giving you worse recommendations. Given your expressed lack of interest in everything it has recommended thus far, have you considered that when you search for something, that might become the strongest signal of interest that the recommendation engine can work with?
I am convinced that music.youtube.com upvotes and downvotes are irrelevant. I have been frequently using "Discover Mix" for 3 years. It seems pretty simple, I like dance music with no lyrics. I have downvoted maybe a few thousand songs. I get the usual snackbar. "We will tune your recommendations".
What really gets my goat is when I flip back to the browser to see something I have already previously downvoted since there is a "thumbs down" highlight. Whatever algorithm is being used, it doesn't have the ability to not play something that has previously been disliked.
Why I find this amazing is because if you told me to write a "Discover Mix" algorithm, the first or last step of that is going to be the only thing I really know. Filter out the manual dislike clicks.
It’s bizarre, because I understand why YouTube recommends heavily disliked videos or just things that you personally are likely to dislike. Anger leads to massively increased engagement, as Zuckerberg famously discovered.
But music? Most people don’t listen or engage with music they dislike, and just skip to the next track. They can’t even serve additional ads that way, at least as far as I know. Unless they’re trying to inflate some made-up “total streams started” metric or something, it doesn’t make any sense to avoid filtering out disliked tracks. It’s purely a net negative for them.
I don't get it either. What is is even worse is that the algorithm has pulled a some incredible music recommendations for me but they are so few and far between.
My fav is Countdown at Kusini by Manu Dibango. The soundtrack to a 1976 Nigerian action film that I absolutely love. Totally from left field.
Most recommendations though are just absolutely terrible. Either stuff I would never listen to or David Bowie "Let's Dance" because I am a Bowie fan. The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible.
At this point I just assume Google is far less competent than what it it seems like they should be.
> The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible.
This is what I notice as well. Before the end of Play Music, I'd uploaded around 30k tracks to my library. I stream music fairly often. So it knows enough about artists I enjoy and can suggest others I don't know.
But when it picks something from an era/genre that should be at least adjacent (let's say early 90's alt rock) it skews so heavily toward the same overplayed tracks I grew sick of hearing on the radio decades ago.
Nirvana? Teen Spirit/Come as You Are
Jane's Addiction? Jane Says
Soundgarden? Black Hole Sun
Then as often as it throws out something modern or classic that I'd never really heard and enjoy discovering, it goes into weird tangents with stuff I dislike and always thumbs-down. If I always downvote an artist, the algo should be able to infer that I don't like the artist. From there, it should pick up the pattern. It never does, and I still get Kid Rock, Dave Matthews, Nickelback, and Linkin Park in there constantly.
music.youtube.com can't even play a playlist on shuffle correctly. I have a list with ~600 songs in it. It always just picks like 14 random ones and loops through them for ever.
I do this as well. My experience was that after doing it for long enough, none of the videos being recommended were of any interest to me. This made me realize that roughly 90% of my YouTube usage was viewing content I didn't actually care about. I concur with others that using browser extensions that get rid of recommendations and only show the search bar is the healthiest way to use YouTube, at least for me. I get some FOMO when doing this, but I've found that reiterating to myself that my natural inquisitiveness should be enough to still find interesting content on the platform when I want to seek it out.
Not interested
Tell us why!
I’ve already watched this video
Submit
I’m kind of okay with it recommending channels that I may or may not care about. The channel name can be a decent indicator here. Watching one video about building practical car ramps does NOT mean I want to watch the “V8BALLZ” channel. I tell it to stop, and it does, and that’s fine.
But odten OVER HALF of my YouTube feed is shit that I’ve already watched from channels that I follow, and The Algorithm Almighty won’t take the fucking hint to stop showing me the same shit no matter how many times I click furiously at the incantation.
It’s almost like they really wanti to emphasize the “submit” part.
Do you want recommendation? I use Distraction Free YouTube which simply blocks the main page, leaving only the search bar. When a video is playing, it blocks out the sidebar as well. As a result, I don't see recommendations anymore at all, just my subscriptions.
Relative to itself. I truly discovered YouTube back in 2016. It recommend me Ben Eater building a computer on a breadboard for instance. Great stuff. Now a days it recommends good stuff once in a while, most part is irrelevant to my taste or the content i watch on that account (i have two, just so content don't get mixed up)
I think when people say that, which I have said before too, we usually refer to previous experience with YouTube. Same when I criticize Google's search quality for example. It's compared to how I found it before.
Sure that's a bit difficult to quantify. Like for example, there was a period where discovering new channels that were right up my ally was something that happened once or twice a week. YouTube would just recommend a really interesting video from a channel I have never seen before, then I'd discover a lot of content that I really enjoy.
Recently, I needed to cruise Reddit and other random sites for recommendation. Then maybe every few months I'd come across a channel that's 6 or 7 years old that's exactly the stuff I watch all the time, and some how I never saw it before despite searching for very similar terms before and finding nothing I was interested in.
For example, I just discovered a channel called asianometry. He's been making videos that are exactly the kind of stuff I wanna listen to when I'm walking the dogs, but some how I came across it by a complete accident through Reddit.
If there’s an option on whatever YouTube interface you’re using, try to select the “Related” section of the recommendations on a video.
At least in my experience, that list seems to be running the old algorithm that actually pulls videos related to what you’re currently watching, and doesn’t utilize the awful “personalized” algorithm that just recommends that same three videos over and over again.
The worst part is that the existence of that feed in some versions of YouTube means that they’re totally capable of offering the classic 2014-era recommendations that people really liked across the board, they just...don’t. For some reason.
A massive expansion into new markets, an entire generation of new users, and lack of any meaningful competition due to the size of library and sheer cost to run such business profitably.
In the last 10 years, YouTube has expanded their partner program across the globe and reduced the requirements to become eligible to make money. They struck profit sharing deals with many traditional media companies many countries too that drove more people from those countries to the platform, which then drove views for organic users, which made being a "YouTuber" a viable career option in many new markets, which drove engagement, etc.
There is also no surprise that during the last 10 years there was an absolute explosion in the number of 1-14 year olds getting hooked on the platform. That cohort has almost infinite free time. Videos targeting 1-5 year olds literally have hundreds of millions of views. There are channels that regularly do 200M views per video just in tantalizing colors, music and shapes for that cohort alone. Then there is the 8-12 cohort, and the 13-17 cohort. YouTube only reports some of the 13+ numbers because of laws probably, but it's an everyday sight for me to see very young kids in trance staring at "YouTube Kids" videos while their parents do grocery or deal with guests, etc.
And finally, there is no YouTube competition. Facebook tried for a while, but they didn't make a dent. Twitch is for streaming, not video content. TikTok is the only competition YouTube sort of has, and it's still a different format/appeal. YouTube killed short content format a long time ago because they thought people leave YouTube too quickly if they load a page to play 20 second video. TikTok showed them that there is at least 1 billion people who are into that if the UX is right. But other than that, there is no YouTube alternative/competition because it's almost impossible to operate such thing profitably. In the last 10 years more and more people have come online. Video is a very important format, and YouTube has an absolute monopoly on it. Google can turn profit on YouTube now, while also controlling the entire online video market. No one else finds the ROI equation worth it because there is a very little chance they would dethrone YouTube, and it's very expensive and not at all profitable being a very distant #2.
This made me chuckle, because I remember a few months ago when a fellow did an investigation into the mysterious erstwhile-country trio @taylorred. https://youtu.be/JAALDob9Ev0
Taylor Red is a country and western band consisting of identical redhead triplets, who haven't played a concert in years. They apparently run a content farm and a bizarre one at that. Every single one of their videos is a Short with the same title, "wait for it... :scared emoji: #shorts" and they do crazy nonverbal stunts on every one.
As near as this investigator guy could figure, this content farm is designed to have an international reach (therefore, no dialogue in English) and also to appeal to children (even the youngest nonverbal ones) with bright colors and amazing optical illusions.
Yet Taylor Red continues to hold themselves out as a country band. Who knows how this works? Gaming the algorithm FTW!
Your timeline is off. The time period where people here are claiming YT has gotten worse is after all of those things happened, and even if it were right, why would YT even care to stay relevant for the niche needs of some individuals, when it has a massive incentive to provide the world with a better way to watch videos?
I mentioned those as the cause of YouTube’s explosive _user_ growth. Most people like me so claim YouTube experience worsened usually mention 2018/2019-present. Youtube is continuing its momentum in user growth, though obviously slowing down as they were at 2b users in 2019, and are at 2.5 in 2023. They have had an explosive _revenue_ growth however between 2019-2023, but it’s also no secret that they have been pushing 3 or 4 times the amount of ads they used to push. Google search does the same. When you have established a monopoly, it’s not like people can go search or get their videos elsewhere. Quadrupling ad watch time will give you explosive revenue growth even with the same user base.
> why would YT even care to stay relevant for the niche needs of some individuals, when it has a massive incentive to provide the world with a better way to watch videos?
Why would YouTube has massive incentive to provide the world with a better way to watch videos? YouTube’s incentive is to increase ad watch time. That’s all. Whatever shape that takes. If it means pushing videos targeted at getting kids to click on them, they’ll do that. If it meant improving relevancy for niche needs of some individuals, they’ll do that too. When you’re only chasing metrics like that, things usually go in cycles.
The numbers tell you longer videos == more watch time == more ads == more ad watch time. Your goal becomes clear, push more longer video content. Force people to record 10 minute video to show you how to remove a laptop screws, 9 minute talking about the laptop and what screws are, and 1 minute showing what stickers or labels you need to remove to get the screws out.
Have TikTok come and eat a significant market share of “video watch time” on the internet, which causes advertisements dollars to now split their budget between the 2 of you, so you correct by introducing or pushing short format again.
Assume that fun, simple, entertaining videos have a bigger market == more views == more ad watch time, so push those more and push more in-depth “niche needs of some individuals” aside. Few years down the line, discover that some content is “ever green” and some isn’t, and “ever green” content has a significant market so autocorrect to push that.
YouTube, and most companies, have given up on trying to have consistent logic or statement or vision or mission or plan or any of that nonsense stuff. Just have a model for things, we want to maximize X, what do we need to do to Y. With X being profit only constrained by legal requirements.
YouTube will come around again. It has before, and it will again. It’s just at the moment it’s focusing on short term viral entertainment videos, and trying to figure out the right recommendation algorithm for that.
>Most people like me so claim YouTube experience worsened usually mention 2018/2019-present.
I'd argue Youtube got bad when they transitioned from a reverse chronological subscription feed to a primarily algorithm driven front page, which is at least a decade ago.
Even if it didn't immediately turn bad at that point, that's when they committed to the enshittification (though I'm sure one could make a case for an even earlier point).
Er, I guess you've never heard of YouTube shorts firstly, and secondly I haven't watched a single ad on YouTube in literally 5 years, as I have YT Premium for free through some promotion I got from another subscription I have (maybe T-Mobile).
So my experience is not ad related whatsoever.
Also I'm not reading most of what you're writing here, a Gish gallop is probably not your wisest move on HN.
Calling something a term used for a specious debate tactic when it is not degrades the ability for others to accurately make that accusation.
Your one or two sentence insinuations instead of statements which can be argued against lay ground for long responses because you, sir or ma'am, are using a dishonest tactic (two actually, add ad-hominem for the new account jab) and I feel that your 'others in HN' would agree with me.
Continually asking easy, loaded questions then disregarding the responses and attacking anyway is a low form of rhetoric.
Isn't that the question, whether or not what he's doing is a "specious debate tactic"? You saying "when it's not" begs the question. It is, in my opinion. You can disagree, but your disagreement is not objective fact, just a belief.
Nor did I, "disregard the responses." I pointed out missed concepts, which to me were gaping and exposed a fundamental lack of understanding of the problem (how do you not know about YT Shorts when talking about TikTok eating YT's lunch?).
Finally, for what I wrote to be an ad hominem, I would have needed to claim the author's argument was, specifically, wrong as a result of who they were. I never actually said anyone was "wrong" per se; my disagreements with the arguments have been on substance (I mention YT Premium as a counterpoint, for example). I also made observations related to things other than the user's argument, but I never claimed they were wrong as a result of those observations, only that their credibility was injured.
> Isn't that the question, whether or not what he's doing is a "specious debate tactic"? You saying "when it's not" begs the question. It is, in my opinion. You can disagree, but your disagreement is not objective fact, just a belief.
Sorry but if I call a fish a cigarette it is not a disagreement over belief. In this case 'gish gallop' has a definition:
The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. -wikipedia
Please tell me how this applies to the response you admit to not reading.
> Nor did I, "disregard the responses."
You specifically said you didn't read at least one of them.
> Finally, for what I wrote to be an ad hominem, I would have needed to claim the author's argument was, specifically, wrong as a result of who they were.
You wrote that you would take them seriously if they weren't a new account. If that isn't 'wrong as a result of who they were' then what would you call it?
Funny you mention fish; there’s no such thing! So is a cigarette a fish? Might as well be. [0]
You have quoted the fact, which is the definition of the Gish gallop. Your opinion is that it does not apply here, and I disagree. You do not hold authority over how to interpret English, so you cannot therefore declare factually that I am wrong, only that you disagree.
As for taking something seriously or not, that’s got nothing to do with right or wrong; you need credibility to be considered, and without credibility the “rightness” of your argument never makes it to evaluation. Happens all the time in the legal world [1], and certainly not at all related to the innate properties of the person who makes the argument.
I know you won't get this so long as you're frustrated, but there's some real irony in this comment. Maybe in a few weeks come back and reread this to find it.
> God forbid if I search for a something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic.
Wipe your search (and watch) history - assuming you meant YouTube Search (which is getting worse by the day but I digress); Google Search at least for me doesn’t affect my YouTube recommendations at all.
I wiped my search history and told it to not remember my search history. I left my watch history alone. I'm pretty happy with the recommendations I get from this combo. It generally doesn't recommended things I've seen, and doesn't have my search keywords polluting the recommendations
not really these days if you ask me. yt has been terrible at suggestions for years. it came to a point where i went on yt almost anxious in anticipation of all those thumbnails featuring open mouthed morons staring at me.
Same thing if you click a YouTube link from a friend. I only open them in private windows now because otherwise it wrecks my recommendations, even if I tell YouTube to forget I watched it or to not recommend it etc.
I've done this to the point of getting less than a half page of recommendations, only autogenerated "Mix" playlists with music from 5+ years ago or almost exclusively videos from a channel i recently watched or subscribed to.
I installed a channel blocker[1] extension to block channels from ever showing up.
The could have added an option to block channels from recommendations ages ago, it's by design.
Especially negligent with the amount of kids on the platform.
Unfortunately, this approach cannot solve the clickbait problem, because it is baked into the videos themselves. If someone is using clickbait for their videos, the video itself is very likely to be low quality. The rise of clickbait has led to content creators doing things like exaggerating reactions, misrepresenting things for views, putting on overexcited voices, etc.
It's just the same as how the creator's previous work, SponsorBlock, can only put a bandaid on things, because ad incentives lead to creators padding out their videos to 10 minutes, causing the videos to be needlessly long and rambling. Not to mention videos where the entire content itself is an advertisement.
> If someone is using clickbait for their videos, the video itself is very likely to be low quality.
I disagree. There are many creators that produce content that I consider high quality that use clickbait thumbnails and titles. If they don't, they have a disadvantage because of the metrics the YouTube recommendation algorithm uses.
With LTT it's a 50/50 situation imho. Some videos are interesting and/or informative, some are basically just an ad for a medium-quality but expensive product. And most of the time it's not easy to judge which is which from the title and thumbnail. On floatplane it's mostly possible, but still not as easy as I'd like and there's still the odd video that is presented as being an honest opinion but in the end is just ads again.
And the way he addresses this when being asked about it on his streams is just adding insult to injury. It's kind of sad that such a good source of news and general information in that field is being diluted with so much (more or less blatantly) sponsored content.
> the video itself is very likely to be low quality
This is incorrect, lots of educational channels use clickbait because otherwise they simply won't be as successful and would not be able to sustain themselves. Veritasium does a video on exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
It's a really annoying direction for Youtube to have gone in.
What they _don't_ want you to do is just watch a few channels that you subscribe to and leave the website, so they force all this other stuff you didn't ask for in hopes that you stay (which works, hence why they keep doing it).
How about setting the latter as a bookmark so when you begin to type youtube.com it directs you there instead of to the homepage?
Or like me: I learned to always click the subscriptions button when I'm on the start page or done watching a video. Had quite a few moments where I saw somebody complain about the home page and my first thought was "did they remove the subscriptions page?"
Here is a reply I made in the past to a similar complaint
> It's not just the Linus Tech Tips or the Mr Beasts of the world doing algorithm optimized titles and thumbnails now. Even really great channels like Tom Scott, CGP Grey, and Kurzgesagt are falling for the trap now.
> And I don't blame them! That's what's needed to survive on the platform these days. It's a race to the bottom.
> DeArrow hopes to solve this. DeArrow puts everyone on a level playing field. There is no race to the bottom since no one is allowed to be algorithmically optimized. It pauses the race, and let's the true best videos rise to the top.
While a niche extension of course can't remove all bad incentives, it still brings out the videos that actually are good themselves, ignoring the branding they were put in.
It's kind of odd to me that the two examples shown on the page are from creators who aren't really all that clickbaity, CGP Grey and Tom Scott. Their videos typically _are_ what the title says, maybe with a slight bit of poetic license, and their thumbnails are eye catching but relevant and not too egregious.
Veritasium has a video about this and I’ve seen other creators like GothamChess and maybe even Tom Scott talk about how they have to create clickbait thumbnails otherwise they get no views. The YouTube algorithm punishes creators who don’t use clickbait.
They claim that they only create clickbait because the platform requires it, but that argument is undercut a bit by the fact that they use the same playbook on floatplane.
Stuff like that does not age well at all, and they are sacrificing longevity for immediacy. If I search for videos on a certain topic and see the 'youtube face' on the thumbnail my intuitive trust for that video plummets compared to one that looks that looks plain and informative. However someone scrolling through looking for interesting stuff to watch may be more likely to click on something attention grabbing, and people doing that a lot all at once (upon release) accelerates the trend numbers so you get a whole lot of eyeballs at the very beginning.
They are not being honest when they say they have to do it for clicks. They have to do it to monetize attention when it is most important to their brand. After that they have sacrificed any long-term value. This is also why they have to create new content all the time at all costs. It is unsustainable and why youtube creators burn out. I hope they invested their money well before that happens.
To be fair, he doesn't blame the platform in that video. He says "I need to keep titling my videos in a way that allows us to adapt to how viewers are discovering new content". It stands to reason that the same forces that influence viewers on YouTube also influence viewers on Floatplane.
At least on floatplane their video titles are a lot less misleading (not perfect but better). Unfortunately it won't make sense for them to have someone design another thumbnail when they can just use the same as on YouTube.
it's sort of true. but only if you need millions of views and to grow to be one of the dominant channels on the platform, which realistically you don't. there are youtubers I watch who just use a frame from the video and a normal title and they comfortably get views in the hundreds of thousands or more
I think this is a definition thing, because I agree with you, but the author's comment below seems to imply clickbait is anything that looks flashy. I found this definition when googling "what is clickbait" and I like it:
> Clickbait is a sensationalized headline that encourages you to click a link to an article, image, or video. Instead of presenting objective facts, clickbait headlines often appeal to your emotions and curiosity. Once you click, the website hosting the link earns revenue from advertisers, but the actual content is usually of questionable quality and accuracy. Websites use clickbait to draw in as many clicks as possible, thus increasing their ad revenue.[0]
In Tom Scott's case, the video thumbnails look flashy but are accurate and representative of the video.
I think a good example of clickbait vs non-clickbait according to this definition would be Jazza vs NerdForge. I stopped watching Jazza because he would put great looking art in the thumbnail slightly blurred out, and the actual video would be about everything except that artwork. Whereas Nerdforge will show a huge piece of beautiful art, and that's what the whole video is about.
Just because someone presents their work well doesn't mean it's clickbait. And this is an age old problem, it's the reason we have the idiom "don't judge a book by its cover". I appreciate the effort people like Tom Scott, Sebastian Lague, and Nerdforge put into their thumbnails, because a picture is worth 1000 words and they use their thumbnails to paint that picture.
CGP Grey and Tom Scott have both changed their thumbnails from their previous style to new more “click-baity” ones. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just what creators have to do nowadays to keep up with the state YouTube is moving toward. I think this is why the extension author chose these two as an example.
Even the Locking Picking Lawyer — about the most sober, no-nonsense youtuber has started “jazzing up” his thumbnails with goofy emoji faces… the content is still the same but even he is not immune to this, sadly.
This was a purposeful choice to demonstrate the extent of the clickbait/sensationalism problem. Both channels have only changed their thumbnail and title style in the last few months, and previously had great titles and thumbnails.
Edit: To clarify, when I say "clickbait" here, I am using it as a neutral term referring to any materials used to convince someone to click on a link. I understand that it is kind of a loaded term and it is not used anywhere in the extension itself because of this.
The title of this post seems to be taken from the satire title on my YouTube video demo. If you install the plugin and view the video from there, there is a better title. It was meant as a demo of the extension.
I like more descriptive titles! Don't know if I agree about the thumbnail though. Replacing a "You won't believe what they do here!!" with "A tour of X facility where Y is produced plus an interview with Z" is much better. It's more expressive, easier to find what you're looking for, and overall a definitive improvement for the viewer.
However, I'm not sure a random screenshot, or any still frame from the middle of a video is a better replacement for a custom thumbnail.
The only benefit I see of something like that is to explicitly reduce irritation of stupid thumbnails, not to improve your ability to find content you care for. And if you get emotionally worked up enough because of stupid youtube thumbnails that you must change them to something that's obviously just as random, you might need more meditation. It's just youtube, it's not worth it.
Looking at Tom Scott now I don't really see it. Most of the thumbnails seems to be him next to the object, an arrow highlighting it and a short fact about it. On the contrary, seeing the submarine in the thumbnail with this plugin kinda spoil the ending of his video.
Even then, Tom Scott is still not the worst out there, which makes the demonstration less convincing. Show a channel full of shocked-face thumbnails, where the effect is much more visible, and now we’re talking.
I guess I haven't noticed any difference, and what I see on their channels today isn't what I consider clickbait. IMO it's at least a step or two from clickbait.
While I’m just as annoyed about the clickbait problem as everyone else, it is worth noting that it’s hard to blame it on the individual YouTubers. If you don’t follow whatever the algorithm demands that given week, you’re unlikely to get very many views at all. Even subscription notifications are fed into the algorithm now, and YouTube has been proven to be perfectly willing to not send out notifications for videos it seems unworthy. This even affects subscribers who turned the bell on, a feature that was supposedly released to mitigate the first time they implemented that change by supposedly offering an “always force notifications for this channel’s uploads” option, but YouTube’s guidance now says that the bell only guarantees receiving all notifications generated by a channel while also stating that not all uploads will generate a notification.[1]
Linus Tech Tips famously ran an experiment several years ago (and I believe have rerun it a few times since then) and determined that, even though they hated doing it, videos which used clickbait titles and thumbnails got consistently got 20% higher engagement than ones that didn’t use clickbait.[2] I’ve also heard anecdotal numbers even higher than that, and there’s a knock-on effect as YouTube tends to promote channels with consistently high performance way more frequently (this is why big Game Theory uploads instantly and consistently show up in everyone’s recommendations).
This isn’t a complaint about your tool at all, don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to point out that most of these big channels are their creator’s primary business, and it’s gotten very difficult to be successful at YouTube without resorting to algorithm tricks like these.
Edit: Ah, yeah, I missed your “It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.” text on the page. You already probably know all of this.
I will add an addendum in response to “Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.” because I actually know how that got started.
About a year or two ago, the late great Minecraft streamer Technoblade ran into an issue where it turned out that one of the community-made thumbnails on one of his videos had used traced art. He quickly sourced a replacement piece and updated the thumbnail, but then quickly noticed something interesting happen: YouTube treated the thumbnail update almost like a new upload, and that video showed back up in people’s recommendations, accordingly with a massive bump in views. He tried this with a few other videos, sometimes changing the title as well, and got similar results.
Other YouTubers began to copy this strategy, and it was ultimately discovered that updating the title or thumbnail caused Google to “re-crunch” the video in terms of the algorithm, and applying the most popular current title and thumbnail styles were led to a serious increase in recommendations and views, even if the video was several years old by that point. Many YouTubers began to abuse this, updating their videos with “modern” metadata stylings, and since then it’s become standard practice for big YouTubers and has led to a serious increase in growth for them.
Once again, it’s an algorithm problem and not an individual YouTuber problem, but that’s what started the most recent trend of editing the metadata on old videos rather than just applying it to new uploads.
I read recently that after himself making a video about clickbait on Youtube, Tom Scott joined the bandwagon and has started going back through his videos clickbaitifying the thumbnails
I agree that CGP Grey isn't the best example though, his thumbnails seem to just broadly be those little cartoons as they always were
Youtube already has quite an interesting clickbait detection mechanism. If the click ratio on a thumbnail is high, but the watch time low, it will be downranked as clickbait.
This means if the thumb/title is a bit sensationalist, but the content is still good, it could stay up. This leads to the current situation where slightly annoying titles and thumbnails are used, but the really egrious stuff gets filtered.
Yeah, ok. But I would really love it if content creators stopped putting kindergarten emotion faces on thumbnails. Replacing a doorknob will never require a level of emotion indicated by hands on cheeks eyes wide “Oh” face… So just please, please stop. I’ll even cave on shitty titles like “most people don’t know this” or “you’re doing X wrong” if it means that I can stop looking at people making stupid faces in every thumbnail
I feel this would be better automated with a LLM rather than relying on user-generated content which can be subjective. For the thumbnails, they can be simply a snapshot of a moment in the video (most played moment where the viewership is highest) than again, a user-provided screenshot.
DeArrow is made by the same person that made SponsorBlock. It's about the highest quality of user-uploaded content, and users mark the following: sponsors, promotions, exclusive access, subscribe callouts, video highlights, intermission, credits, recaps, jokes, as well as create custom chapters.
Not only is the quality extremely high, users self-regulate: a user submission is first spread to a few random users to see if they approve of it, then more, until it spread throughout. So, bad submissions will go out the window. Are there some submissions like highlights that are just "good enough" ? Yes. Does it need to be perfect ? Absolutely not. Does it need to run through a black box of an AI model that's going to upload 5% of the time absolute crap ? Never.
User submissions will always be better than an LLM (which isn't even appropriate for the context of a video.)
It just seems like an unsustainable system that requires user opt-in on a platform where people go to actually avoid opting into anything and just watch videos.
The model doesn't have to be a blackbox either. Plenty of open-source models can summarize a video faster than any human can.
LLMs are a black box not because they're closed or open source, but because they're based upon a neural net. yes, a closed-source LLM is more of a black box, but an open-source LLM is still a black box
beyond the error rate, the problem with using an LLM vs user-generated titles is that LLM use costs money, and we're not quite at the point of running high-quality LLMs on generic hardware yet. also, realistically titles aren't the main problem that needs solving here
also, do not underestimate petty people: sponsorblock works just fine with user-generated data
finally, the video demo clearly shows that if there isn't a user-uploaded alternative thumbnail, DeArrow picks a frame from the video to use, as is handily suggested by GP who hasn't read the article
That statement will age like beautiful, fine wine when your LLMs keep training on LLM generated data and get influenced by the very same creators putting in clickbait images, leading the LLM to believe it is the most appropriate part, etc.
The notion of "garbage in, garbage out" is debunked when we introduce an additional signal, such as responses generated by humans, validation through tests (like code verification), or engagement in a game where maximizing the score is the aim.
Consider the extraordinary case of AlphaGo Zero. Despite beginning with a random initialization and without any human game data to train on, it mastered Go and chess solely through game feedback, reaching superhuman levels. The potency of feedback is nothing short of magical.
Shifting our focus to humans, what's the nature of our major breakthroughs? More often than not, we serendipitously encounter them. They don't typically arise from deduction but from meticulous observation of how our existing theories align with reality. Essentially, we observe and integrate feedback.
Involvement in a larger system - be it the world, society, the internet, or even a dialogue session with a human - is how AIs can transcend the mere regurgitation of the training set. With every interaction, they receive a nugget of new data in the prompt and feedback following the response.
Yeah but don't worry too much about changing your habits, just continue to be selective and critical in your consumption. Remember that it's all about finding a balance between staying informed and maintaining your personal preferences, right?
Yeah, I do a pretty good job already at avoiding garbage but every once in a while I'm caught by surprise. Still, for me at least it's not worth sending a list of every video I watch/search for to a third party and also cloudflare. If this gets popular I could also see it being used maliciously, but it is an interesting idea at least.
Negative signals don’t seem to work on any platform. Instagram has a “don’t suggest posts like this” which does absolutely nothing. The only thing which kind of works is “Don’t recommend channel” (YT) / “Don’t suggest posts from this user” (Instagram). However, on Instagram this option only appears occasionally. In most cases I don’t get this option, so I need to click through to their profile to block them. By clicking through to their profile it sends a strong signal to Instagram that I want to see more content like the account I just blocked, so my feed starts filling up with garbage. Writing this makes me realise I need to quit, but it’s difficult.
The best method for stopping addictions is motivation. If you got enough motivation you can do anything. To get that motivation, you need reasons, and you have to find those reasons, and in this case, is that clickbaits waste your time.
That's my method. And you probably could say "people sometimes can't see the reasons" - that's another issue, and there are different solutions to this, but it is a problem.
Edit: live as you want, but I believe that the best way to you live life is to first control your life.
> It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.
This is another way to say that it is a market of attention with individual actors acting (nearly) independently but with similar convergence.
In a way, that makes it everyone that is a "buyer's" fault. Which unfortunately means this will not appeal to most people (doesn't mean it isn't useful). But we've converged to selecting click bait videos over non-clickbait.
Cliques are a weird thing. People have them memorized and will roll their eyes at you if you repeat them, but this is the epitome of "judging a book by its cover." Repeat it all you want, but there has to be a hook. And anyone properly marketing their work intentionally wants you to judge the work by the cover.
As a bigger issue, I think YouTube fails for "explorers" and concentrates too much on "exploiters." Referring to exploration vs exploitation strategies. ML models will typically do this. Especially because most people are "exploiters."
I also use this (but for Firefox) and I always forget quite how obnoxious the “real” thumbnails are until I see YouTube on another device — it's the same disorientation as seeing a browser without an ad-blocker, or an OEM Android or Windows.
So I guess I'm also in the “why and how do other people put up with so much crap” camp :)
Fun! In an ideal world it would be better to use ML to recognize the faces, arrows, etc. A first pass could blur them. In a real ideal world the ML would watch the video and give it better titles and thumbnails too! Sadly we live in the real world . Maybe in 2030
Whatever solution needs to be at the network layer to capture android tv, Apple TV, Roku, Xbox etc.
Having it be a chrome extension only fixes the problem for a computer, not everyone in a household.
And realistically, it would be nice to extend way beyond YouTube, rewriting all headlines on all articles with a community sourced patch list you can scroll through and upvote the best variant of each title. And then rewrite the articles to remove repetition. Combine articles that say the same thing.
I can almost imagine a web browser, that when it invests a page, uses what it can take from the page to update an internal store of that story with new information.
You could generate titles from the subtitles! Even auto-generated subtitles are pretty good nowadays, feed it to AI and get it to summarize them in one phrase?
A combination of Enhancer for YouTube and PocketTube allows you to do this, you can auto convert shorts to normal videos you can scroll through with the former, and with the latter, you can filter out shorts in your subscriptions.
Artifact (a news platform mobile app) tackles this problem with AI regenerating the article's title if you ask it to (and reporting the ask back to its servers to save others).
I do not think I gonna use it since all I watch is an 1+ hour long videos kind of "speaking heads". There are no problems of clickbait titles if you can overcome an urge to click on clickbait and chose to pick a quality content only at least for the sake of good recommendations afterhand. But I feel the problem of arrows and I will recommend the extention to my friends with bad cases of youtube addiction.
This just rewards bad behavior with my consideration which will only beget more of the same kind of trickery elsewhere in the videos.
Personally I BlockTube anyone I see using a soyface/arrow because it is indicative of what kind of uncritical audience they want. I can easily wait a year and get a summary of all those videos in 1 minute total from a respectable intellect. There is no FOMO.
This doesn't help YouTube: YouTube is doing fine and the average public doesn't care if their suggestions are all youtube faces and red arrows: they'll spend even more time on the site if that's the case.
This is for the small niche of the public that wants and cares about sane upfront media.
This sounds like something you could use LLMs for as LLMs are quite good at removing bias in content. You might run into context length issues feeding the whole transcript in though .
i mostly access yt via freetube but if i don't then clickbait remover for youtube protects me from a visual barrage of atrocious open mouth pictures ... i just couldn't put up with it anymore.
I'm already using the "Clickbait remover for youtube" which replaces the thumbnail with a randomly selected one from the video. I'll give this a try, though. Plus, I recommend using SponsorBlock extension (skips sponsors, but also has a "skip to highlight" feature) and Youtube enhancer.
More specifically they solved the "bad" form of click bait where people click on a video and it turns out to be something they did not want despite the thumbnail and title being attractive.
