Technology

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 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 would love it on Piped, they already have sponsorblock

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.

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

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.

As well as uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock and BlockTube.

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.

I think a bigger problem is they demonetize and depromote any video discussing a controversial or kid-unfriendly topic. This affects the actual content.

Also, don't forget to subscribe, hit that like button, smash that bell, and leave a comment letting me know what you think!

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.

Here's hoping this gets added to SmartTube like SponsorBlock was.

on the extreme levels, yes, but almost everyone on the platform does some form of deception to convince you to click.

Like it says on the dearrow website:

"Clickbait" isn't the exception anymore, it's becoming the norm. Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.

It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.