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Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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