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Comment by Fogest | Hacker News Reader

BREAKING NEWS: More people died of COVID today. I see see often headlines in my Google news feed saying something along those lines.

I've stopped clicking on YouTube videos that give me no idea what they are going to be in the thumbnail/title. For example on Linus Tech Tips second channel ShortCiruit a good chunk of their videos do this. Latest one from 3 years ago in my sub box "I almost hurt myself open this...." and the thumbnail is him maybe holding a big TV with a game on the screen. I can't tell if it's a big monitor, a tv, or if the video will be about what's on the screen in the thumbnail. I wish that videos/news/blogs that use titles like this could also just tack something on the end in brackets saying a couple words about what it's actually talking about.

Too often I'm having to fall prey to the clickbait just to see if maybe the video will interest me or not. More often than not it doesn't and I just wasted time.

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Offtopic to OP but regarding Linus Tech Tips:

I also stopped watching 90% of all LMG (his company) videos (on all their channels) because of the clickbait forcing me to click onto things that I am not interested in, only to quickly leave the video. I am not going to watch what I don't want to watch whether it has a clickbait thumbnail and title or not, so they just annoy me more with this. I have not voiced my opinion for two reasons: 1) it's a really common opinion, Linus is aware of it and this style is obviously good for business since they kept it, 2) fear of intense backlash from the fan community.

So yeah, got that off my chest.

Yeah it seems like almost all of their videos are using clickbaity titles now especially on the secondary channels like ShortCiruit. My viewership of their videos has really dropped. I'm sure they have seen results from gaming the recommended videos but I'd be interested to see if it has affected how many average viewers they get from the subscribed people.

Man first you had to get AdBlock, and recently it feels necessary to use SponsorBlock, and now it feels like there needs to be a new one called ClickBaitBlock which maybe swaps the video titles for a user voted new title similar to SponsorBlock. I'd actually install it if it existed.

Not the same as what you wanted, but this one can help: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for...

I do think it would be cool though to expand SponsorBlock into more crowd-sourced things, since there is already a community of people willing to help.

That's quite a name! I thought it was a chrome extension at first. Thanks for pointing it out.

Unfortunately this one seems to just change the casing of the title and then grabs a frame from the video to use for the thumbnail. I find that the thumbnail at least sometimes contains something useful whereas this may be counterproductive.

With YouTube you can hover over the video thumbnail and see a short preview of the video play so that aspect is already kinda covered by YouTube itself.

It's definitely getting closer to what I was talking about but unfortunately falls short.

There's a fan community? I was always under the impression that his videos served as glorified ads for consumer tech. The technical insight delivered was skin deep. Didn't he brag about a 20 drive NAS one week only to cry about the raid0 config dying and taking down a lot of their footage the next week?

Yeah but the actual raid card got kaput. Interesting recovery process. (Basically read the firmware and flash to another card as far as i remember)

I don't think it was Raid 0 if you're talking about the time a long time ago they nearly lost data. If I recall correctly, the data was in Raid 6, but there was no external backup.

Video for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k

Actually a pretty good telling of a story all too common for those tasked with handling precious data.

I'm not sure if you're referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k ("All of our data is gone"), but in any case, I've heard references to ZFS in later videos so yeah, the situation's probably not quite that insane now.

That video is technically hilarious though, it TL;DRs as "download Ubuntu-based USB image provided random RAID recovery company, boot USB and provide said company headless SSH to broken system"... at one point in the video I remember Linus talks to another recovery company about the process and the guy pretty much went "...O.o..." which IMO sums my own opinion up, lol

I'm on the same boat. I stopped watching their videos after I started to feel more and more videos were made just for the sake of making more videos. Every time I bite and watch through, I realize I haven't gained any fun, information, nor education and just wasted 10 minutes and 1 second of my time. I don't think it's just LTT. I feel that more and more channels are going this way.

I watch LMG content because I find it more entertaining than anything else on YouTube, and I'm not even a PC gamer. I rarely look at the poster or video title at all before watching, I just queue the new items immediately.

I'm in the same boat .. actually, I'm more set in my ways, if the title doesn't tell me what it's about, I don't bother looking at the thumbnail. Here are some titles from recent videos:

    I REALLY Love Building Computers!!
    Never seen one of these before...
    Sorry. Your gaming laptop sucks now.
    Maybe upgrading is pointless…..
    Linus was right.

It's such click-bait, and so annoying.

It's sad about LTT too. I can't find it now, but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts, so in his quest to optimized for higher and higher counts, he annoys some long time viewers. Can't blame him if it works, but I do wonder if it'll be self-defeating in the end.

They don't do the clickbait titles or thumbnails on floatplane(their in house version of youtube), and will often edit the titles if it's too clickbait-ey

Does something like that include their videos from their other channels too?

All of their channels are in the same LTT page on floatplane, although apparently they will be moved to other pages later.

>but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts

Veritasium also had video on this topic: https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=1041

Here's the video where Linus goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA

I'll give him credit for being straight about it.

Oh yeah I can't really blame them. I don't feel upset personally at them for it, I feel upset at YouTube for making these clickbaity titles do better than more normal titles. It's unfortunate because this is likely actually just machine learning realizing that a lot of us humans use our pea brains to decide if we want to watch a video and thus often times those clickbait videos get more clicks. But I really wished they put some manual tweaks in place to make the user experience a bit more enjoyable and stop promoting those clickbait videos in recommendations so that creators didn't feel the need to do it.

I mentioned it in my other comment, but it feels like we need a ClickBaitBlock similar to SponsorBlock which uses user generated timestamps to skip sponsor blocks in videos. Could be a user generated/voted on new title that gets used. I'd actually use something like that too. It allows creators to play their YouTube game, but also us avoid the game if we choose to. Hell the extension could even support allowing the video creator to submit their own alternative titles. It would be a neat way to beat YouTube at it's own game.

I am interested in how he A/B tests these things. I've never seen non-clickbait LMG videos, so if they're constantly testing they must not be up for long. Or they test on their forums or something like that.

(I know it sounds like I'm confirming the theory that videos don't get recommended if they're not clickbaity, but I only rarely get LTT recommendations in general. I do specifically go to the channel and look for things to watch every so often, however, and it's there that I don't see any non-clickbait test versions.)

They often change the titles of their videos, sometimes multiple times. Not sure if that counts as "A/B testing" though.

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