It’s getting ridiculous. There’s one youtuber that swapped the thumbnail 4 times this week just to make people look at it again and think it was a different video. The worst part is that it sort of works, I keep looking at it then remembering I saw something very similar from the same channel name yesterday.

I hate this so damn much.

  • They’re not trying to trick people into re-watching videos they’ve already seen. YouTube generally does a pretty good job of not recommending those videos anyway. They’re simply testing which thumbnail/title brings the most traffic. It might seem petty but it makes a huge difference.

  •  ColonelPanic   ( @ColonelPanic@lemm.ee ) 
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    8 months ago

    I’d recommend DeArrow to get rid of this. I’ve set it to just pull a thumbnail from the middle of the videos, and the titles are community edited to remove the massively clickbaity ones (if the channel is big enough).

    It even comes in ReVanced so you can remove them on mobile too.

  • Yeah, i think they’re testing what will drive click. I noticed channel like kurzgesagt will initially post it with very clickbaity thumbnail and title, then will swap to less clickbaity one. It’s annoying but i do understand why they do this. Makes me appreciate those who don’t join the enshittification race.

    • this is a strange addon, it wants you to pay $1 for it, but say you can use it for free, then after it’s intalled it says it’s not activated by default, with an activate button that once pushed, says “You are successfully registered for free access. You will be notified when free access is granted.”

      how exactly will it do that if I wasn’t asked anywhere for my email address or any other identifying information before I installed the firefox addon?

      i get this guy wants to get paid, but this is silly

      edit : 11 hrs later, a firefox page just spawned by itself with the message “Congrats! You now have free access to DeArrow :)” and now checking the addon all sorts of options have seemingly unlocked and are able to be adjusted

      •  furikuri   ( @furikuri@programming.dev ) 
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        8 months ago

        If I had to guess I’d say that their other project, Sponserblock, got a little bit more popular than they were expecting and this is just to help alleviate server costs. Most of the API endpoints don’t require any auth at all (the single one that does accepts a random UUID), so any checks must be locally done (maybe system time?). The extension and server back-end are licensed under GPLv3 and AGPL respectively and are also entirely self-hostable, so the code is out there to verify if you wish

  • A simplified explanation is that early traction on a video determines whether or not the algorithm will recommend it. If you miss that initial window, you will never get as many views. As such, channels have to aggressively test and change the title and thumbnail to gain the attention before that window closes. And yes, I hate it

  • I seem to remember one youtuber saying that there was a new option to upload two different thumbnails and let some algorithm switch between them to see which does better.

  •  hendrik   ( @hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ) 
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    8 months ago

    As far as I know, it’s simple A/B testing. They come up with several titles, thumbnails, test which one draws the most attention and switch to that one. YouTube is all about attention and this is the way to be successful.

    There have been tools around to do that for some time. And I think it’s part of YouTube itself, nowadays. I think it’s called YouTube “Test & Compare”.

  • BlockTube makes it possible to hide stuff you’ve already seen, among other things. Presumably it works by video ID, so thumbs and titles don’t matter. If channels keep reuploading the same shit… just unsub, I guess.

  • I’ve seen it happen. It’s a bit annoying because there was a music video an indie artist made that I really liked, and the creator kept changing the name of it and I couldn’t find it and thought it got deleted or something!