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Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

I want a script which hides all videos which have a thumbnail of a person with their mouth open. Way too many creators have been using that now a days.

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I use this, which uses crowd sourced thumbnails from within the video https://dearrow.ajay.app works really well. Made by the dev that made SponsorBlock

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem... - it replaces thumbnail with a frame from the video.

A dumb thumbnail is a useful signal to know that I won’t want to watch the video anyway :)

As annoying as it is, I remember a channel I subscribed to once mentioned that they did a little AB experimentation and turns out “surprised face” thumbnails do actually attract more views.

I don't doubt that at all. But that's turned into way too many creators using it as the default expression in every thumbnail. I remember visiting a true crime channel and all their videos had the same face....

Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) said pretty much that. They do the "OMG" face for a day or two, and then switch to a less annoying thumbnail.

Understandable but unbearable: these aren’t mutually exclusive.

That's a planned feature [1] - we'll probably add a new item to video menus which lets you flag a channel for reaction faces, then replace their thumbnails with another frame from the video

[1] https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/issues/19

Am I on a different YouTube than yours? Or perhaps the algorithm is working well. I rarely see them.

btw, instead of doing all of those, isn't it just a straight forward thing to, say, just create good content -- it will start paying off way better off in longer term, if not immediately?

It's not one or the other. You can create great content for retention and still use clickbait to get 10x more clicks.

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