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Comment by banana_giraffe | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same boat .. actually, I'm more set in my ways, if the title doesn't tell me what it's about, I don't bother looking at the thumbnail. Here are some titles from recent videos:

    I REALLY Love Building Computers!!
    Never seen one of these before...
    Sorry. Your gaming laptop sucks now.
    Maybe upgrading is pointless…..
    Linus was right.

It's such click-bait, and so annoying.

It's sad about LTT too. I can't find it now, but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts, so in his quest to optimized for higher and higher counts, he annoys some long time viewers. Can't blame him if it works, but I do wonder if it'll be self-defeating in the end.

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I am interested in how he A/B tests these things. I've never seen non-clickbait LMG videos, so if they're constantly testing they must not be up for long. Or they test on their forums or something like that.

(I know it sounds like I'm confirming the theory that videos don't get recommended if they're not clickbaity, but I only rarely get LTT recommendations in general. I do specifically go to the channel and look for things to watch every so often, however, and it's there that I don't see any non-clickbait test versions.)

They often change the titles of their videos, sometimes multiple times. Not sure if that counts as "A/B testing" though.

Oh yeah I can't really blame them. I don't feel upset personally at them for it, I feel upset at YouTube for making these clickbaity titles do better than more normal titles. It's unfortunate because this is likely actually just machine learning realizing that a lot of us humans use our pea brains to decide if we want to watch a video and thus often times those clickbait videos get more clicks. But I really wished they put some manual tweaks in place to make the user experience a bit more enjoyable and stop promoting those clickbait videos in recommendations so that creators didn't feel the need to do it.

I mentioned it in my other comment, but it feels like we need a ClickBaitBlock similar to SponsorBlock which uses user generated timestamps to skip sponsor blocks in videos. Could be a user generated/voted on new title that gets used. I'd actually use something like that too. It allows creators to play their YouTube game, but also us avoid the game if we choose to. Hell the extension could even support allowing the video creator to submit their own alternative titles. It would be a neat way to beat YouTube at it's own game.

Here's the video where Linus goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA

I'll give him credit for being straight about it.

>but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts

Veritasium also had video on this topic: https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=1041

They don't do the clickbait titles or thumbnails on floatplane(their in house version of youtube), and will often edit the titles if it's too clickbait-ey

Does something like that include their videos from their other channels too?

All of their channels are in the same LTT page on floatplane, although apparently they will be moved to other pages later.

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