this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Love the idea, but just to be the devil's advocate, I think it will just mask garbage videos. Currently, the clickbait thumbnails and titles are an indicator to blacklist a channel, without having to waste time watching it.
Unfortunately because of the way Youtube's algorithm works, even high quality channels are buried if they don't play the game.
Yeah, even good ones do it.
Got any examples? I don't recall any actually quality and worthwhile channels that still use those dumb thumbnails.
All those channels in the screenshot in this post.
Veritasium, he even has a video crunching the numbers as an explanation why he has to doit
Do you have a link to the video? I casually skimmed through his video list for the past year or so, but none of the titles jumped out at me for this.
Could also be a good example of why this extension sounds cool haha
Edit: Found it just a few more videos below here I stopped haha. "Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective" https://youtu.be/S2xHZPH5Sng
Yeah, that one I stopped hating clickbait so much after watching it, trying to become immune to it
LTT and SmarterEveryDay to name two.
If you look at the DeArrow website and browser extension pages, I made sure to only use high quality channels as examples (Tom Scott, CGP Grey) to demonstrate how far reaching the sensationalism problem is.
CGP Grey is personally painful to me. He used to be a no-nonsense education youtube legend, but in the last few years he's just maximised clickability - even going thorugh his whole back catalogue and changing titles and thumbnails.
For example, he made a great video about generative adversarial networks ~5 years ago but now its titled "How machines like ChatGPT learn" - despite coming out before GPT.
Pretty much every successful YouTube channel edits titles. It's just part of the algorithm game now. You will often see videos cycle through several different titles shortly after release.
You have to blame YouTube and the people who click those garbage thumbnails
The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.