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Comment by djaychela | Hacker News Reader

I produce Music Tech-based educational content on YT. It started as a hobby and sideline to my main work (which at the time was classroom teaching of the same content). While I'm no longer working in classrooms (pandemic plus other reasons led to this), I'm still producing content, which I think is of good quality and worthwhile.

The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.

I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.

I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.

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This reminds me of a saying I've heard from Dean Graziosi (sales type guy).

"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".

I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.

One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.

> but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.

The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?

Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.

Just to add, most of us AREN'T trying to become big YouTube viral influencers. My channel has 2.5k viewers and all my videos were done because I want my in-class students to have a resource to review at home. I got my doctorate and a career as teaching faculty to teach students, not become another Computerphile. I love the channel and link it regularly, but again my passion is in helping people learn in the classroom. The "Thanks!" comments and $100 a year I get from YouTube are just nice bonuses to that end.

Creating better explanations on how to use and apply knowledge is so huge.

I’d be curious to learn if there’s any pain points or things you wish you could do faster in your process. Happy to chat offline :)

Honestly the biggest hurdles are the mythical free time and being comfortable enough with my understanding of the material to allocate said free time. I love the Khan Academy-style super casual, not overly produced, just "here's me writing out the concept and providing a worked example". Take a look at the link in my profile, you'll see its mostly that and talking head over code/slides recorded on OBS. I like that style because it requires minimal overhead work on my behalf.

Students' attention is low (not an insult, just what my analytics show). They are mostly searching for a fix to their immediate problem when coding. So my videos are split into 3-10 minute chunks covering that single thing. Recordings for a single concept take roughly 1ish hour, mostly a combination of setup, being human and flubbing words, and something in my examples going awry and taking too much time on it rather than demonstrating the example. I mostly record on Sundays (again, free day) or at night if I know I'm going to be away. As faculty, you're not paid extra to do this, so its very much intrinsic altruistic volunteering your time to do it.

And like I said, the second part is being comfortable enough with the material to record it. I'm teaching Intro to AI for the 3rd time this semester and while I'm confident in my ability to teach it, I still have some kinks in my examples. Typos, what gets covered when, etc. type things. I feel ready to record it during my next iteration, but then we fall back to making time to do it.

> "The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?"

Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent.

Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and volunteers, and it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships). I know several people who are technically brilliant, but have abrasive personalities and/or fail to get their point across to key stakeholders, so they don't achieve what they want.

There is a difference between honest salesmanship and sales pitches that include lies or fraud. It's necessary to sell, but you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.

Sales and politics are not avoidable, I agree with that. While a scientist might have to dreadfully deal with salesmanship now and then, it shouldn't be affecting the day to day. We have procedures to isolate these things from core business, so we can focus without the hyper-selfawareness of salesmen. If you have to be constantly getting the most eyeballs, attention, upvotes, in everything you're doing, it will change you and your work. Look at the conversational tricks that people use to get ahead at your (least) favorite social media, and see which type of personality is promoted there.

What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change. So pitting youtubers against the algorithm (just pimp your quantum physics lecture with an O-face thumbnail) isn't the only way forward. There's also "here's how YouTube could be better" or "we need a better alternative for this type of content". Unfortunately, we have almost 0 visibility and control over the algorithm so there's very little behavioral analysis that can be done.

> "What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change."

You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.

Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

>While a scientist might have to dreadfully deal with salesmanship now and then, it shouldn't be affecting the day to day.

Scientists spend something like 20-30% of their time begging for grant money.

Worse still, in order to get the grant money, scientists have to abandon the genuine pursuit of knowledge and do some random busywork bullshit that they deep down know will produce nothing of value.

Once they have produced the bullshit research, they then spend another disproportionately large chunk of time convincing their colleagues that their research is actually valuable.

The remainder of their work time is spent pretending that they don't realise that their peers' and colleagues' work is complete bullshit.

Don't get into academia.

> Persuasive communication is important even outside of business.

You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.

> you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.

In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose.

> You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics,

No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.

>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.

Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.

> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."

Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.

> In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money

I might be confused about the context or definitions, but I didn't read on any darwinian model that included notion of "losing out to". Did oaks lose out to orcas? Or was it the other way around?

Sales were around before the industrial revolution and likely before the agrarian revolution. I'd conjecture that whether one employs ethics or not, a moderate amount of salesmanship can spice up ones daily hunting-gathering.

You're wrong in looking at orcas and oaks. They are too far apart the evolutionary path so that it is meaningless to think of them as competitors.

Darwinian selection is the species versus the environment and this environment can include other species, as well as other individuals in the same species with slightly different traits, that will compete for similar resources as well as the climate.

It's very difficult to even think of who is actually a competitor of who, was Facebook a competitor to myspace? Youtube to myspace? Tumblr? Livejournal? These were all platforms competing for creators and attentions so I think they are all in a certain degree of competition.

I think a sale in this space is the gathering of attention (i.e. time and/or money). But thinking of what's required to actually learn might offer some insight on why it is hard to compete in this space. To learn people need to spend effort and although it can be made fun it is extremely difficult to be made effortless. On the other hand, entertainment is effortless but it offers little learning. So these are two parameters that need to be tuned. But I think the problem here is that the algorithm benefits entertainment much more than it does learning, entertainment is more valuable for youtube's ultimate purpose (to grab the viewers attention) and so to thrive on youtube people that want to offer learning have an uphill battle to fight.

So I think this move is Youtube acknowledging that learning is also desirable in society and can be pulled apart from the loop and monetise in its own way. In other words, it's an evolutionary split, cells all have a common ancestor but some cells evolved to harvest the sun energy while others evolved to harvest the energy of other cells. Learning being desirable has given rise to platforms such as coursera which are also multi-million businesses and Youtube probably sees them uploading most of their content to youtube anyway (usually as private videos), so why not adapt the platform a little bit to give existing creators a chance to stay on youtube instead of moving to other services?

This move won't really solve the problem of entertainment predating on people's time over learning (if we consider that a problem) but it's not really intending to do that. So I believe if we want to look at things from a darwinian perspective we have different angles to look at. Creators that produce entertainment content will probably still benefit more than the ones that produce hard to approach but very good learning material, why? because attention is the most valuable resource out there. This move offers little solution to that, but, on the other hand creators will have more tools inside the platform to manage learning which will completely change the current online learning business and we'll see platforms like edx and coursera in need of offering more value to pull themselves apart from youtube. Because users from these platforms (including youtube education) are already searching for valuable learning experiences we might see evolutionary jumps in this particular area. Though this might also be a race to the bottom where youtube captures the segment and then changes to optimise attention-seeking. We'll see.

I think the problem is not precisely in the salesman but in that in a free world, the only way to get people to listen is to be appealing and what appeals to us is often not that healthy. Terms like "engagement machine" makes it sound like it's the algorithms which are unhealthy, but the problem begins with the audience. If everyone wanted to watch math content all the time then we'd have math celebrities over YouTube.

> Terms like "engagement machine" makes it sound like it's the algorithms which are unhealthy

I stand by this term for various reasons. I think it's accurate and summarizes the current day social media status quo.

> but the problem begins with the audience

Yes, but humans are non-linear. Porn, for instance, is extremely powerful for attracting clicks, and we've figured out that we need to keep it separate. Even if people want some amount of porn, they want other things too and the best way is to not mix. Now say hate, or cheap entertainment, is not porn but not super far off. Similarly, that type of content tends to win the attention-game against math lectures, if presented side-by-side to the average amygdala. If we mix it all together, it's hard to focus. So.. I'm pretty skeptical to leave education to Youtube. Not only do they have all the cheap content, they're incentived to bombard you with it.

>The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?

That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.

Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.

Most classroom teachers in the U.S. don’t need to sell because they are either employed at public schools (attendance is compulsory), or at private schools (selling is handled by the school administration).

In the long run, online learning will probably become dominated by the equivalent of private schools: companies that hire great teachers and, separately, great marketers to build audiences.

Or look it at this way: Nonprofit authors don’t generally design their own book covers. They work with a publisher who does that. Why should teachers try to design their own YouTube thumbnails?

(On the flip side, if you highly value your independence as a sole proprietor, then yeah, expect that you’ll have to put on the marketing hat sometimes).

Also a good chunk of folks (i know) that are good at what they do, will not be salesy.

Call it misplaced pride or whatever, but they usually feel doing/saying something purely because it helps selling comes across "not pure" or "not in good faith" or not "why I do this".

Eventually they end up justifying with something along the lines of "good product (or person) just sells itself" or end up bitter comparing themselves with someone who sold worse stuff, but sold more to stay long enough in business.

good advertising/sales/marketing (i know they are not the same) strategies have a large upfront cost, which most if not all good-but-failed products/services cannot sustainably pay for.

My hope for the internet was to lower the bar by being accessible to everyone and allowing more indie sellers to prosper. And it did deliver. what i did not see coming was this industry for gaming the system which in turn drowns the true indie voice.

My first serious number theory course was called "number theory and cryptography." The professor told us on the first day that modern crypto is basically a trivial application of the major proof from the second half of the course, and that the title was basically click bait. Awesome class, a couple students got NSA interviewers later.

Click bait is ok sometimes?

> if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing

Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.

You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.

The justification some youtubers (LTT comes to mind) use for clickbait video titles/thumbnails is that they feel that so long as the content itself is good then it doesn’t matter what techniques they use to get people to watch it. Their logic is that there’s nothing wrong with lying to get someone to watch your video so long as they enjoy it once they do.

To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.

“Crazy HACKER reveals YouTube ENDLESS views trick”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32785822

It's a hard line to walk. And I'm sure not everybody draws the same line.

The part I think LTT and many other folks with a similar philosophy ignore is that even engaging with their title/thumbnail isn't free. Clickbait forcefully grabs attention which requires every potential viewer to spend time and energy evaluating that option. A less forceful title/thumbnail makes it much easier to quickly and easily find the things you actually want to spend your time and energy on.

To make matters worse, most/all clickbait does it's damnedest to make it as hard as possible to decide a video isn't worth the time. Even when you know it's not worth it, the clickbait can make it extremely hard to actually skip.

So yeah, it has a real cost, even when the video itself is good. It's not equally good for everybody, and figuring that out has a cost too.

(And LTT in particular really pushes the boundaries, far more than most that actually try to not be dicks. LTT will sometimes draw the line at 'merely' technically not saying a lie, and blame you for hearing one anyway.)

> One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.

This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.

Are there any books on sales that would be suited for a typical SWE HN reader, i.e. sans fluff, modern and practical?

From what I have seen this idea of is the problem with a lot of online courses.

The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.

A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.

This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.

We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.

If that were a viable model for maintaining an audience, McDonald's would've found a way to sell food that doesn't kill people.

I'm a creator too. I'm small on YouTube (3,880 subs; 6.4k views and about 293 hours watched in the last 28 days), but have a (relatively speaking) large Discord with 3,800 members. I have a mailing list of about 1,600. My goal and focus is to sell, but it's to sell a big package around the idea of IT education. I want to sell to people who want the interaction and community, not just the knowledge dump.

And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.

Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)

Hey 3880 subs is pretty good. I'm still on 241. haha. It actually takes a lot of effort to get past 1000 subs/5000 watch hours, which is the minimum for monetization.

The minimum for you to monetize it. Google will gladly sell ads and keep 100% until then.

I wouldn’t have built what became a $2000/month revenue website if I didn’t start making $2/month, then more work to get to $20/month, then 200, then 2000 over ~5 years.

YouTube is shooting itself in the foot with its monetization cutoffs.

I agree, I wish they would let me monetize my channel now :(

Wow, nearly 100% of your subs participate in your community? That's amazing.

that's not necessarily implied, the sets may overlap minimally

What /u/kyleee said :-)

I developed the Discord community via the channel plus other ways.

Reach out? How? Looking up movedx i found a channel with 40 and a channel with 441 subs. Having integrity in 2022 seems pretty cool, but am i missing something...like a link?

There is certainly slimy YouTube tactics for attention and clicks, but not all successful YouTubers are doing slimy things.

If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.

Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.

I was trying to think of a way to word this same thought.

I would expand on it slightly by adding that "Good Thumbnails" are complicated and are not necessarily "Clickbait".

Matthias Wandel comes to mind as exceptional here - almost 2M subscribers as I recall, a popular 'second channel' too, and way against 'youtube scream face' and similar nonsense. He's done a few 'shorts' since initially saying he didn't (as I don't) see the point, but other than that, standout top of class etc.

Came for the wood gears, stayed for the most efficient way to kill mice

I just hope that the use of metadata is enforced using AI the same way copyright is being enforced. I think a better approach would be to corral/wall-off this learning content sub-platform, similar to how kidsyoutube is walled-off. I wouldn't mind typing youtube.ed or edutube.. or something else. The value of youtube would be in the big iron behind it, so the front-end can be anything, as long as it's policed to comply. Example of it not being police. I make a video and I call it "Trump's documents classification". I then use the metadata to insert words used in FBI classification and voila..

"Race to the bottom of the brainstem" is a great way to put it.

I can't take credit from that - I believe I heard Tristan Harris say it on the Center for Humane Tech podcast.

I think there exists a middle ground that doesn't devalue your content, sell your soul, sacrifice your authenticity, keep up with the joneses, etc. That being said, hard pass on the clickbaity thumbnails and titles. When folks suggest "jazzing things up", they might be looking for some vlogging and conversational segments. You, as a personality, are just as marketable and appealing as the content you produce. You are the brand.

An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...

It depends on what you want. Google is optimizing for eye balls so content that warrants more engagement is going to win. 2 questions on the end of the spectrum to ask yourself...

Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?

Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?

Exactly.

While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.

Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.

What exactly does "you won't believe" do?

Whenever people say that I think "of course I don't believe ..." (ie that the topic is stupid, or that the decision of the day by xyz company is weird/bad/good, etc)

why should I believe or not believe in someone who I don't know?

If my mom says "you won't believe me if I told you you are not my son, but adopted" I'd be shocked.

Random youtuber "you won't believe?" - heck I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth! Of Course I DON'T believe you.

> content that warrants more engagement is going to win

What does that even mean?

I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.

Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.

I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.

The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.

>Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.

You used the same type of voice you criticized, I'm confused why you're projecting this narrative onto my comment.

I'm obviously pointing out that clickbait content will get more engagement. I'm trying to make the OP ask themselves what they want... which I believe is very clear.

I probably am projecting and for that I apologize.

I do bristle at the use of words like content and engagement. If you are thinking about those things, you’ve already surrendered. I believe thinking in those terms will lead you to make more of the same stuff that’s already out there.

Mostly though, nobody should make content. That’s a word used by platform operators because it’s all they see your work as. To them, the thing you’ve created is just another file they can store in their CMS, to be monetized later. Be a video producer or podcaster or digital artist or writer or whatever it is (more specific is better IMHO), but don’t call yourself a content creator.

> Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?

I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)

>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?

No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.

Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

In other words, an elaborate justification for him joining the other YouTube clickbait clowns.

Been watching him from basically when his channel started many, many years ago. Was really disappointed to see him give in to this.

Seems like a well argued, valid justification to me. Do you have a counter argument to his argument?

Very minor anecdata I would like to share: I have discovered Veritasium like most others, at the time when they weren't "clickbaiting", when their videos actually had the thing that they discussed right there in the title. I learned tons of things. Each new video, and each title, made me eager to discover that thing.

But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.

Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.

I just want to second this. I experienced a similar trend.

Hi your content sounds interesting to me. I couldn’t find a YouTube channel named djaychela. Would you mind sharing?

Thanks. It's musictechtuition - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition

I’m so thankful for creators like you who just want to share and teach and eschew the clickbaity crap. Ugh.

I am hopeful that somehow…somehow!!! we can have the quality content like yours more discoverable without having to game the system.

It reminds me how “SEO” has turned into an entire, absolutely ridiculous meta game industry that rarely has to do with how good a website actually is.

Would you mind sharing a link to your content? Thank you.

Thanks. It's musictechtuition - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition

Thanks!

Honestly, if your content is good, all the more you should put some effort on your thumbnails. Don't feel bad about it.

To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?

I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.

The middle ground I've seen is to concede a bit to the clickbaters and make a few clickbait videos that talk about what you do and what's available in the other videos.

People will never just spontaneously realize you exist and on their own seek out the media you produce.

They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.

Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.

There are some examples in fitness-educational content, say Jeff Nippard and Athlean-X, that use some clickbait tactics in terms of thumbnail choosing, titles, and editing, but then nonetheless delivery high-quality educational content that doesn't seem like it should have been behind clickbait.

But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.

I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.

Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.

While I agree with your hesitation in marketing deceptive content, I think you may be overloading marketing on YouTube with the term click-bait.

From Wikipedia:

> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.

Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.

HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.

Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.

There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.

Yeah it is, and once people grow they stop making that quality content in favor of the churn

> Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.

same.

i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.

3Blue1Brown and channels of the like are the ones I gravitate to. Unfortunately a lot of things on YT are based on bad news and exaggerations selling better than more reasonable content

> I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom...

Yup.

The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).

Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?

Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?

Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.

I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.

Click bait isn't different than wearing a funny hat to engage students in class.

> Click bait isn't different than wearing a funny hat to engage students in class.

what are you talking about?

a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.

your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.

If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.

so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.

If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.

You’re baking in the assumption that goofy hat is 100% correlated with bad content, but I’d say 30% of my YouTube subscriptions do the goofy hat thing (usually just having somewhat baity thumbnails / titles) yet deliver great content.

And honestly? I don’t care. The content is good, and if the hat gets them more viewers then all the better.

I'm not who you replied to, but I do care, I don't want to be made to feel stupid, I don't want to think that people are stupid, I want things to be presented as they are even if not immediately understands them.

In the UK we see this with nonsense talk of 'the [energy] price cap' being some £ figure per year - when it's not, it's a £/kWh cap, but the media can't cope with that, we're stuck with what it means for 'the average household'. Even comparison sites refuse to compare what you actually pay, £/day and £/kWh, and instead insist on asking you about number of bedrooms etc.

I'm sick of everything being dumbed down.

Ok well that’s a different scenario. I mean I agree some things are dumbed down way too much.

I’m just saying there’s a decent reason for some of it. A huge audience on YouTube are children, teens.

Good example of clown being educational is ElectroBoom. He constantly keeps "accidentally" electrocuting himself and goofing around. The videos have very crisp editing and baity thumbnails. At the same time a lot of the content is deeply informative and educational.

I'm not sure you can call his series a curriculum, yet I think I learned a lot more from there than from my university classes, despite watching it primarily for the fun and not for learning.

You're correct. Now imagine that the vast majority of teachers focused more on wearing funny hats to engage students than teaching them the material - because schools paid them more for that.

Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.

I disagree.

A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.

A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.

> ... wearing a funny hat ...

An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.

If that's the definition, then the thumbnails we're talking about aren't click-bait.

The thumbnails are doing the funny hat thing.

3b1b is really good. If one can explain that maths in my younger days …

You should put a link to your stuff in your Hacker New profile.

Done, thanks!

Hi,

I tried to find your channel, but I don't think I found it. Would you say it's name or link to it, if you don't mind me asking?

Hi. Its https://youtube.com/c/musictechtuition - thanks.

Would you consider Daniel Naroditsky’s educational content to be clickbait? If not, that might be a decent middle ground to target.

Good to see producers also don't like attention-grabbing titles or thumbnails. I fight clickbate with the only tool I have found. If a recommended canal have clickbait titles, shocked faces on the thumbnails or if the titles are auto-translated to my language I select never recommend this canal and move on to the next

Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing. If you want to sell or get the word out about what you are offering it helps to have a good marketing effort. Yes, creating the material is a lot of work, but that doesn't mean that marketing is something that doesn't need hard work.

The problem is it isn't "good" thumbnails. It's that stupid fucking, "who farted?" face. Or more often for young women, it's "Uh-oh, I did a bad thing" face.

I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP

It's not stupid if it works. It's not like it's YouTube who is deciding these types of thumbnails perform well. It's just that users engage with those kinds of thumbnails more.

The race is about making the best possible thumbnail based of empirical data and not aesthetics.

Right but the context to this is not fixed and is human constructed. Just because a bad system produces undesirable outcomes doesn’t mean we have to shrug our shoulders as if this is the only possible state of things.

It's succumbing to these [1] types of thumbnails that it sounds like the GP is trying to avoid having to do.

Andrew Huberman has tame thumbnail images that are professional and informative. Like others have said, there has to be a middle ground to explore.

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nZQgszA0_80/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwE...

> Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing

are you seriously going to pretend that optimizing for the most cringy thumbnails , because its a race to the bottom on Youtube, is marketing?

this is a ridiculous take.

Yes, but it's not about making cringe and it's not a race to the bottom.

I don't see how it's not marketing? YouTube is willing to promote your video for free and asks you to upload some promotional material for them to use.

I used to think like this about marketing in general. "Build it and they will come" was the usual motto in my formative years. But isn't it a shame to build a great product and then not have people engage with it, just because I frown upon marketing?

Could you share your channel? Always interested in educational music content.

Thanks. It's musictechtuition - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition

> refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails.

not just that but the ones shown in this post are absolutely cringe. makes for zero credibility when it comes to education.

The least they could do is an in app thumbnail creator that's fairly decent.

I find this thread interesting because the 10-or-so comments I've read are all discussing the merits and necessities of 'salesmanship' for this kind of work and throwing their hands in the air for 'What could be done' (maybe not literally but by omission of engagement with that part of the topic).

From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.

I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.

So maybe the solution is community willpower.

You can start of click bait and then gradually transition into what aligns with your worldview.

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