If only YouTube had some social mechanics like dislikes, where you can mark a video as 'bad' so users would see that far more people disliked this video than liked, so it is likely not very good and you shouldn't waste your time. ...
I spend most of my time on youtube asking it to "not recommend this channel". But even youtube is decreasing in quality theses days, regarding recommendations. God forbid if I search for something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic.
Unfortunately, this approach cannot solve the clickbait problem, because it is baked into the videos themselves. If someone is using clickbait for their videos, the video itself is very likely to be low quality. The rise of clickbait has led to content creators doing things like exaggerating reactions, misrepresenting things for views, putting on overexcited voices, etc.<p>It's just the same as how the creator's previous work, SponsorBlock, can only put a bandaid on things, because ad incentives lead to creators padding out their videos to 10 minutes, causing the videos to be needlessly long and rambling. Not to mention videos where the entire content itself is an advertisement.
It's kind of odd to me that the two examples shown on the page are from creators who aren't really all that clickbaity, CGP Grey and Tom Scott. Their videos typically _are_ what the title says, maybe with a slight bit of poetic license, and their thumbnails are eye catching but relevant and not too egregious.
Youtube already has quite an interesting clickbait detection mechanism. If the click ratio on a thumbnail is high, but the watch time low, it will be downranked as clickbait.<p><a href="https://www.socialvideoplaza.com/en/articles/what-is-clickbait-on-youtube" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.socialvideoplaza.com/en/articles/what-is-clickba...</a><p>This means if the thumb/title is a bit sensationalist, but the content is still good, it could stay up. This leads to the current situation where slightly annoying titles and thumbnails are used, but the really egrious stuff gets filtered.
I feel this would be better automated with a LLM rather than relying on user-generated content which can be subjective. For the thumbnails, they can be simply a snapshot of a moment in the video (most played moment where the viewership is highest) than again, a user-provided screenshot.
This looks great; I'm only worried that this might change my habit of specifically avoiding clickbait, so I might no longer send that negative signal.
> It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.<p>This is another way to say that it is a market of attention with individual actors acting (nearly) independently but with similar convergence.<p>In a way, that makes it everyone that is a "buyer's" fault. Which unfortunately means this will not appeal to most people (doesn't mean it isn't useful). But we've converged to selecting click bait videos over non-clickbait.<p>Cliques are a weird thing. People have them memorized and will roll their eyes at you if you repeat them, but this is the epitome of "judging a book by its cover." Repeat it all you want, but there has to be a hook. And anyone properly marketing their work intentionally wants you to judge the work by the cover.<p>As a bigger issue, I think YouTube fails for "explorers" and concentrates too much on "exploiters." Referring to exploration vs exploitation strategies. ML models will typically do this. Especially because most people are "exploiters."
I've been using this <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-for-you/omoinegiohhgbikclijaniebjpkeopip" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...</a> extension for quite some time. Works wonderfully.
This starting to annoy me too. It's not just shitty channels. Even good channels are doing it because the analytics tells them to.<p>General patterns:<p>- "I <verb>ed the <superlative> thing in <place>"<p>- <thing> vs <other thing><p>- Boobs/cleavage in thumbnail<p>- Stupid face in thumbnail<p>- Large amounts of money and/or other numbers<p>I'm going to try the plugin.
Can it undo fake Anime eyes?<p><a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nzlSBBVpbS4/maxresdefault.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nzlSBBVpbS4/maxresdefault.jpg</a><p>I actually like 'Pitch Meeting' videos - but their thumbnails are the worst.
Fun! In an ideal world it would be better to use ML to recognize the faces, arrows, etc. A first pass could blur them. In a real ideal world the ML would watch the video and give it better titles and thumbnails too! Sadly we live in the real world . Maybe in 2030
Does anyone like seeing a video (usually clickbaity title and thumbnail) but with super low view count?<p>I only want to see if such a video is coming from a channel I explicitly subscribe to (friends usually).
Artifact (a news platform mobile app) tackles this problem with AI regenerating the article's title if you ask it to (and reporting the ask back to its servers to save others).
I do not think I gonna use it since all I watch is an 1+ hour long videos kind of "speaking heads". There are no problems of clickbait titles if you can overcome an urge to click on clickbait and chose to pick a quality content only at least for the sake of good recommendations afterhand. But I feel the problem of arrows and I will recommend the extention to my friends with bad cases of youtube addiction.
This just rewards bad behavior with my consideration which will only beget more of the same kind of trickery elsewhere in the videos.<p>Personally I BlockTube anyone I see using a soyface/arrow because it is indicative of what kind of uncritical audience they want. I can easily wait a year and get a summary of all those videos in 1 minute total from a respectable intellect. There is no FOMO.
This sounds like something you could use LLMs for as LLMs are quite good at removing bias in content. You might run into context length issues feeding the whole transcript in though .
i mostly access yt via freetube but if i don't then clickbait remover for youtube protects me from a visual barrage of atrocious open mouth pictures ... i just couldn't put up with it anymore.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-remover-for-youtube/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...</a>
I'm already using the "Clickbait remover for youtube" which replaces the thumbnail with a randomly selected one from the video. I'll give this a try, though. Plus, I recommend using SponsorBlock extension (skips sponsors, but also has a "skip to highlight" feature) and Youtube enhancer.