this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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theres a chrome/firefox extension that fixes youtube clickbait titles and thumbnails called DeArrow, by the same dev as Sponsorblock, which unpads the vids.
https://sponsor.ajay.app
DeArrow has improved my YouTube experience. I still switch it off for some channels I like (such as SiIvaGunner, for reasons that are obvious if you watch them.) It's best when it has crowdsourced titles, which have actually made some videos more intriguing.
I saw a video thumbnail the other day that would normally be titled "Why Minecraft players built a real life supercomputer", which is way too vague for me to be interested, but the crowdsourced title was "Minecrafters created a distributed computation network to find the tallest cactus," and that made me very curious. I still didn't click it because it was a 23 minute video, though.
I'm also very grateful I don't have to see a lot of clickbait thumbnails. Some of them actively deter me from videos that might otherwise be interesting.
Not sure if i'd say that Sponsorblock upads videos, or at least it only does so partially. It does remove in-video advertisement and selfpromotion, but it doesn't (and can't really) change anything if a video e.g. has content to fill like 3min, which gets drawn out to 10min.
I suspect, with almost 0 evidence, that the reason clickbait seems so effective is that there's a large contingent of viewers that it works on. So when you try playing the game, you'll see a surge in popularity. But such easily-won viewers are also easily lost if you don't play the game well enough, or someone else does it better. So if you want to keep your numbers up, you have to play the game hard, but doing that can drive away the loyal viewers that would seek out your videos even if the algorithm stopped promoting them. You can't measure your success through metrics alone.
In a way, if you play the game how YouTube wants you to play it (which is of course what makes them the most money,) you stop being an artist using YouTube as your platform and start being a worker for YouTube instead.
How is that post clickbait? Isn't it the definition of clickbait?
Post clickbait as in we all know what theyre doing, and they know the audience knows what theyre doing