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Comment by bil7 | Hacker News Reader

>the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs

an unfortunate appeal to the recommendation algorithm that is now a must. You are leaving views on the table without employing these clickbait methods. One solution that many channels use including Veritasium is trying out various clickbait packaging for the first 24-48h, then swapping to something more descriptive.

When these videos represent not only one person's livelihood but also the salaries of a team of producers, camera operators, scriptwriters, etc it just makes unfortunate sense to appeal to the algorithm

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To me it's more the topics he's covering that are clickbaity, I personally can live with the titles but I feel like Veritasium intentionally find topics that have some controversy(or fabricates some if they don't) like the physics debate one, and the "misconception" about electricity one. Instead of focusing on teaching and explain practically how things work in our world he chooses examples that are very abstract and frankly not relevant to most viewers. I feel like it's the Mr. Beast model of doing youtube and one that I'm not a fan of. This combined with the issues other commenters have noted about getting things wrong which in itself if fine but when others have called him out on it he hasn't handled the feedback well. I only noticed this trend the past few years, but really turns me off.

You are right. And I do understand why he does it. I can see his side.

But I sit on the other side. I hate it and will tell everyone how much I hate it.

--- Edit:

Or, if you prefer, in market terms: Because I am not alone, there is a market for non-clickbaity titles, non-exaggerated thumbs, and there are channels that cater to this market.

I think the overwhelming majority of people on HN (and possibly elsewhere) would prefer if they could just have a homepage that was just reverse chronological ordered videos from their subscriptions, with a separate "Discover" tab, with no interference from their algorithm.

This thread might prove an excellent case study for YouTube. I was subscribed to all of the channels I listed and a few more along the same lines; my recommendations have never shown me videos from some of the other channels people have posted in this thread or in reply to my own post. If you want a good recommendations system, this thread has been better than YouTube's algorithm for discoverability on these kinds of topics.

I can't imagine anyone is actually happy with how YouTube works on this front.

I like the home page as it is, but I understand why it frustrates both video creators and people who don't mesh with the algorithm.

Absent action from YouTube, this appears to be what you're looking for on a different page: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions?flow=2

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