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Comment by motogpjimbo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many potential views he loses due to his gurning? I've never watched any of his videos despite YT constantly recommending them to me because I've got a personal rule about never clicking on a thumbnail that has a picture of someone pulling a face or which has a clickbait title.

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I agree with your principles but I'm not strong enough to stick to them. I just installed the addon YouTube Clickbait Remover, which uncapitalizes titles and replaces thumbnails with a frame from the video.

You are in a tiny minority of users. If this didn't work they wouldn't do it.

If I can be honest nobody wants the high maintenance viewer with personal rules about this and that little thing anyway. It's exhausting and they definitely use adblock haha

You're getting a lot of flak for this, but I agree with you and stand by this principle. I have certainly missed out on good content – in the case of LTT, I had some friends convince me it was worth it and they were, of course, right.

But on the other hand, I've saved myself many hours of having clicked through a stupid face thumbnail to some bland algorithmic HeyGuysWhatsUpThisIs-type crap.

Far less than he gains from doing the same, which is the point.

LTT actually A/B tested this and found out that pulling a face with the item in front + grabby title WAY outperformed the alternative.

Which is crap, but that's the world we live in. They do excellent content nevertheless. LTT and MKBHD are the only two tech review style Youtubers I bother following. They get to the point, know their shit and speak calmly.

Some people will stick to watching because of the content, others will actually click on them because of the thumbnails. As they explained (and I'm sure his is the most cited one), it's a simple numbers game. Min-maxing Youtube, so to speak. Or growth hacking, to put it in hip startup crowd terminology.

I mean the HC community and YC companies have no qualms about discussing and promoting the best practices for a good landing page, every time someone comes in to promote their product there will be unsolicited advice about that. It's the same thing, but instead of saying "you should put caps in your title and have an expressive face in the thumbnail" it'll be about the content on the landing page like "you need a screenshot".

That's an oddly specific rule, but okay.

I find enough of their videos to be informative enough that I continue to watch those that I think would interest me. I've become a regular for the their TechLinked channel as I find it entertaining as well as informative but their longer videos and unboxing videos I'll cherry pick: I'll watch reviews of products I'm interested in but I tend to skip the extravagant/outlandish builds they do as I find them pointless since I wont be doing anything like that myself.

I would assume it's a net win for those people to have those thumbnails.

Unfortunately, you're the only one missing out by skipping dumb thumbnails. Obviously a lot of dumb thumbnails have dumb videos, but not all.

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