It’s pretty telling a platform like YouTube really only gets fully enjoyable with an adblocker, sponsorblock and this. I wish PeerTube had a lot of good creators, but last time I checked (years ago, admittedly) it was mostly conspiracy theorists and cryptobros.

I mean yes but also it’s not that hard. Google is not trying to give you a great experience, they’re trying to drive clicks to ads.

I need a mod for my phone my that just makes every icon a picture of some character with their mouth wide open, yelling.

(refer to this reddit post for what I mean)

Calculator? Someone yelling.

Settings? Someone yelling.

Camera app? Believe it or not, someone yelling.

i tried that too, its one of my favourite extensions

There’s also a Scott the Woz version, which I have installed

I would love it on Piped, they already have sponsorblock

Thanks, I didn’t know revanced was a thing. I only enjoyed old vanced for briefly in its last days. So good to hear theres still options like this around.

There is a reason clickbait images and titles are used, they work. If they didn’t work, no one would use them.

I might get it for the titles alone. The clickbaity thumbnails don’t really bother me, but I’d like to have a good title at least.

I don’t think it can be said to conclusively be an age issue. I assure you that many Boomers and older Xers love clickbait titles.

It’s a more granular demographic than just age.

Don’t forget that creators will release a video that you might want to watch later and then change the information.

You’ll see a video you want to check tomorrow but not enough to add it to the “watch later”. But when you check your subscriptions the next day it’s been 12+ hours and they’ve changed the title and thumbnail to further game the algorithm.

As well as uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock and BlockTube.

I second this. The only reason click bait trash thumbnails work is people accepting it.

Too late for that

Unfortunately because of the way Youtube’s algorithm works, even high quality channels are buried if they don’t play the game.

If you look at the DeArrow website and browser extension pages, I made sure to only use high quality channels as examples (Tom Scott, CGP Grey) to demonstrate how far reaching the sensationalism problem is.

The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.

Yooo, can I have a source for this? Just for research purposes

Creator of theq extension here, that is an optional permissions (may ask). It never asks to access to all sites, it only optionally let’s you add support for additional sites such as different Invidious instances. These are arbitrary domains, so it needs permission to ask for any arbitrary website.

Support for invidious is not actually done yet, so right now, it never asks for permission for any new sites anyway

The client side data is used to store your submissions to always show your preferred title, even if there is another submission on the server. You can disable this option in the settings

Access your data for all websites

It’s required to access iframes.

There is an add on, and it works well! Firefox add-on

This…if they want to make their thumbnail as pathetic as possible, let them. It’s much easier to spot the junk this way.

If a channel that makes clickbait garbage thumbnails pops up I just click to not have the channel recommended again, and that has worked pretty well.

Clickbait works and I encourage all YouTubers that I watch to do so. The more people they reach, the more money they earn and the better their content can become. Outside of a minor annoyance to the superusers, using clickbait titles and thumbnails is just good business. Even the very best content producers in their category (Veritasium in educational content, MKBHD for tech reviewing are great examples) use it because they have to: but lots of them dislike doing it. Veritasium has two great videos about it: clickbaiting is a HUGE benefit to any YouTube channel, a good thumbnail alone can account for 20-50% of all views on a video.

Imagine it like this: every time you pay for anything, you get a free 30% discount if you pinch yourself in the arm. Wouldn’t you always just do it? Who cares about the minor annoyance.

That’s what it’s like for the content creator. Put 30 minutes of work into a clickbait thumbnail + title and it’s 30% more views on every single video.