I get him recommended all the time but his thumbnails and doomer titles don’t look appealing (they’re all 1/3 his face). In general, if all a Thumbnail/title elicits is some kind of emotionally loaded tired cliche (AI will kill us all, Reading is dead, We were this close to all being hacked by Jia Tan, Overpopulation, Underpopulation, the decay of [Art Form, Daily Pastime, Emotion, Other Noun], We Did Transgressive Investigative Journalism, Epic Scientist Battle of the Equations, you may add to gis list) I don’t watch it. If it promises cool news about topic, or personal story, I do. Also, I still hate Enrico Tartarotti for some insufficiently explained reason. (he made a video basically dissing vim at some point, and I don’t even know how to use vim)
I keep forgetting about thumbnails. One of the first things I do, when installing or reinstalling a browser, is get DeArrow to remove the clickbait and custom thumbnails. I just found them off-putting for too long.
Same. Freetube replaces them with a frame from the video.
I also set it up to replace the sensational titles with sensible ones
I get trying to remove clickbait thumbnails, but getting rid of all custom thumbnails seems harsh. My thumbnails might be pretty basic, but I make them by hand and would hate to be lumped in with clickbait channels
I don’t think it’s a harsh decision. The thumbnail isn’t what provides enough information regarding the video itself, it’s an aesthetic which I find irrelevant to the content. If the title is engaging enough, that’s what will interest me to click it (regardless of whether someone is a big or small creator).
Youtubes content creators are also its victims, just as much as the viewers.
The problem is the spam so largely outweighs the actual hand-crafted, good ones, that just getting rid of it all is the only real solution for the end user.