this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
3127 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

60073 readers
4364 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] QubaXR 66 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Ultraviolet 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately because of the way Youtube's algorithm works, even high quality channels are buried if they don't play the game.

[–] c0mbatbag3l 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] d3Xt3r 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Got any examples? I don't recall any actually quality and worthwhile channels that still use those dumb thumbnails.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Veritasium, he even has a video crunching the numbers as an explanation why he has to doit

[–] XaeroDegreaz 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that one I stopped hating clickbait so much after watching it, trying to become immune to it

[–] BuiltWithStolenParts 11 points 1 year ago

LTT and SmarterEveryDay to name two.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

All those channels in the screenshot in this post.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] LichbaneLB 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] dack 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

yep.... that one is just rediculus

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.