Clickbait is unreasonably effective [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
One thing that doesn't get mention is how clickbait changes your audience, usually in a race to the bottom. It alienates fewer people than it attracts, but then your new audience reacts differently to your content.
It is pretty easy, when you are engaging in questionable manipulation to justify what you are doing by picking a somewhat broader line for what counts as manipulation compared to what you are doing and then saying "see! there's no way I can't manipulate!". Comforting perhaps but more of a rationalization than a reason.
When you make your decisions about quality with popularity as a basis, there is no way you don't end up being manipulative with or without intent. This is what is wrong with the attention economy, it evolves the world to find and exploit the weaknesses in humans.
I'm finding this to be more and more the case. It seems like a competition on who can withhold the most information about what the video is actually about. Soon enough all youtube videos will be titled "???" and the thumbnails will just be random static
I like him and watch all his videos, but the ease of that justification is why we are on a long slippery slide straight into dystopia.
Maybe that race car driver is a brainlet who would otherwise be living in poverty, so we shouldn't give him too much grief for it. Probably not, but maybe. But the veritasium guy? He's surely a bright guy with plenty of opportunities; he could have chosen another line of work.
A race driver is a much more elite position. There are less of them than there are Youtubers, and there's a lot more attention on you. A dismissal of a sponsorship could be spun into a big PR move, if they wanted to. Compare that to a single social media actor, you'd have to be an absolute huge name to make any sort of difference, simply because there are so many others out there that will immediately fill the gap you'd leave.
Maybe Derek (I had to google his name) would be able to choose another line of work, but what if your passion is to spread knowledge about science and such to the general public? As much as I dislike them myself, I really do believe that social media such as Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, is the best way to achieve that goal today.
I don’t think anything he said is incorrect, but he does seem to miss the world of possible incentive structures that would reduce clickbait.
The only way to stop it is to stop giving an inch. But that will never happen, guys like him have way too much to lose to take a stand. Plus most of the other YouTubers will happily continue so it will have been for nothing.
It's completely unrealistic to expect an individual to do the "right" thing here. When that right thing means their career ends.
This is an area where I was initially very bothered, but over time have arrived at the opinion that it is very nuanced, and that things like this can be incredibly positive.
If I go to the grocery store, they have a display of fruit, and I decide to buy a few, I have been manipulated. They were motivated by profit (sell more fruit). This required consuming some of my attention (I had intended to go to the store and buy different items). However, both I (yummy healthy fruit) and the grocery store (money to owners, employees, suppliers) benefit from this interaction.
There are other types of interactions where one or more parties are negatively affected in the sum of the overall interaction. This are obviously bad, but are besides the point.
If someone has a product with the highest value for the opportunity cost, I want to be manipulated into using it. However I also want to avoid manipulation where I gain little, zero, or negative benefit. It's a complicated problem, and I have found that the maximum benefit to me (and everyone involved) sits squarely (and very annoyingly) in the grey area.
As for Veritasium, I have watched his videos for roughly a decade. Any video of his in my subscription feed is going to be watched. Any increase in viewership which allows him to increase his budget and quality only benefits me, provided he's behaving ethically. I see from this video that he's examining the problem and at least trying to be ethical, which I appreciate.
Well, one YouTuber I follow, don't remember which, was quite irate and disappointed regarding his coverage of a recent self-driving cars video (IIRC), that amounted to ~"barely a bit more than an ad". (Haven't watched the Veritasium's video in question yet, so cannot really comment on the veracity of the claims.)
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the video. However I'm bullish on Waymo's approach to self driving, so I wouldn't feel it as much if the video is too positive.
Tough to put in words really. Maybe it could be rephrased to "I found that he is trying to legitimize clickbait", however the second part of the sentence says that too.
That's rather unclear and nonstandard, in my view.
- pre-roll ads
- embedded sponsored content
- plug for your patreon/other videos
- reminder to like/subscribe/comment
- a tiny nugget of actual content SOMETIMES
- mid-roll ads
- post-roll ads
I agree that 10 minutes feels about right if you were actually trying to convey a good chunk of information in good faith, but that's just not what happens on youtube. Maybe 10 minutes was a good threshold for midroll ads for the same reason that it would have been a good threshold for quality videos.
Videos like the linked one, while technically longer, just result in more and more mid-roll ads. In fact while attempting to watch this one, I got just past his embedded sponsorship plug, when youtube ambushed me with the "Ads in 3... 2... 1..." type of ad that makes it impossible to tell just how much of the video is compromised by ads before watching it.
And it's where I've ended up with my podcasts. Less than 12 or so feels like you're barely getting started and get past about 30 and, as a listener, I'm generally losing interest. It's no coincidence that longer professionally produced podcasts almost always have segments or otherwise break up the content.
Part of that is making sure he can afford to do so, so we should consider holistically whether breaking from the ad roll time format is better in the end or not. if he can keep up the quantity and quality of videos, then maybe it's worth breaking with that format. If he can't, then maybe it's not.
The is a similar question as to whether scientists should break from universities and corporate labs and fund their research and experiments without ties to those institutions, which will necessarily have some impact on the science being carried out in small and sometimes large ways. Personally, I suspect that there would be a large drop in both quality and quantity if this were to become the norm.
I also despise YT ads. (Embedded ads are less annoying because they can be at least slightly relevant to the content.) How much time do you spend watching ads? How much is your time worth?
Some recommend valuing your personal time at $50/h. YouTube Premium family membership is $18 and gives 6 people ad-free viewing which comes to $3/person/month. At these rates you break even at 3.6 minutes of ads. That could be just 2 videos.
Six people who live in the same household, to be clear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27337668
For a deeper discussion pulling in more references and nuances, 20--60 minutes can work, but the content's got to deserve it. Excessive filler content ("Mayday: Air Disaster", The History Channel, "The Gift Shop Sketch" is of course the exemplar: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc) is absolutely maddening.
I think Veritasium makes some of the most valuable and informative videos out there. Definitely not the kind of channel that i would consider "baiting" with titles and then disappointing with the video content itself.
His views on video titles' "clickbaitiness", given the state of affairs of Youtube recommendation algorithms and the "competition" for viewers' attention, seem pretty on point to me.
I think one of his videos that qualifies as pure clickbait is "Can a Wind-Powered Car Go Faster Than The Wind?". It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information. Certainly not 20 minutes worth, and very different from the rest of his videos. It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
It's entertainment, not a scientific lecture. As entertainment, it contained far more information that the vast majority of competing entertainment.
> and very different from the rest of his videos.
I must disagree here, I think most of his videos contain very little information as well. Less than I would like, in any case.
> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
How is this not a good thing? It's great for people who actually want more information, and it's great for the creators who provide said information. It makes the creator community (I hate that term) healthy.
For the first video about the wind powered vehicle, yes i agree. It was more of a story and spectacle than any actual information. Still quite entertaining i think, but maybe disappointing if you wanted to learn something, which is usually the spirit of the channel.
Yes, including one by him, in which he specifically addresses the shortcoming of the video you are referencing and notes it's an example of what he considers a failure of him providing enough information in the video.
Here's an example of someone low-key having really valuable and informative content, with very little fluff: https://youtube.com/channel/UCGKe6VmbFOX-3C30JjEsV-g
I wonder if removing all the engaging "fluff" and just listing information reduces the impact of videos. Like, maybe the trade-off is between having a shorter, denser video so the few people who watch it can get their information in less time, versus having 10x more people watch and learn the information.
Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)
His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.
His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.
Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.
3 videos 10m or less
8 videos from 11m-14m
11 videos from 15m-19m
5 videos from 20m-22m
1 video at 34mWhile I would love this to be true, we have to remember that so much of the internet is a business in our capitalist economy. To many YouTube channels (especially the big ones), the primary purpose of the title is to get someone to watch the video to make money. Sharing information is only a secondary purpose.
This is true across basically every business. The primary purpose of anything is profit, and every other thing is secondary. This is why health care is difficult to privatize, as the primary purpose of profit is very easily at odds with the secondary purpose of health outcomes.
I feel like I see this purpose thing come up all the time in different parts of businesses, and it really makes me wonder whether this system is sustainable. The YouTube channel is justified in writing a clickbait title, because other types of titles reduce profit. And because of the way our society and economy works, reducing profit is always a “bad” thing. You could say that with more profit, the creators could expand the business and provide even more value to their viewers. Maybe that’s true in this case, but that’s basically the whole reason clickbait exists. I’m not sure we should be that happy about it.
I am not familiar with this phrase - is it a typo or is this just a bit of slang I have missed out on - is it a variant of this https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cope
For example:
Alice: I may be ugly, but at least I’m not superficial.
Bob: Cope
Derek wrote a PHD on how to make videos interesting while learning and his YouTube reflects some deep thoughts on how to do that. Quality is awesome, he is personable, and you feel you always learn some deep insider knowledge.
Note that the suggested change would also better enable my requested feature of being able to block specific channels by providing the in-URL hooks to do so.
(Not OP.)
That being said, Veritasium is among the least clickbaity clickbaiters.
But, making something that I think will actually help people, and then watching it go unseen because I wouldn't do the thing required to spread the message via the network effect is a far worse fate.
So, I do the thing.
Maybe that's me, but I think the worst offenders are the ones who actually disappoint (Veritasium not being one.) How can we disincentivize them doing that? Currently, there seems to be little downside for them completely misrepresenting their content.
I saw the video shortly after it was released, and I thought it was ironic the video had a relatively weak thumbnail and title.
Pretty sure there automated tools that A/B test thumbs and titles and most big youtubers use them and then just add a bunch of titles and thumbs that are automatically tested.
In an ideal world, we'd be able to have each impression throughout the day alternate between the Original and Variation which would be a 'true' A/B test. Since YouTube analytics are only provided in 24 hours blocks, our current system is basically the best that can be done taking into account YouTube's limitations.
https://tubebuddy.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5...
But clickbait is something I'm interested in, so I went ahead and watched the video. Or at least I listened to it -- 98% of the video was a guy inexplicably standing on a ladder, waving his hands around, while casting a shadow against a screen.
The video is a justification of why it's okay for him to use clickbait. The same justifications are used by spammers and criminals to justify their actions. Nobody thinks it's fascism when they do it. It's some pretty light-weight wrongdoing he's into though, and I'm fairly sympathetic to the argument.
The reality is that you can't get a good social network without a lot of idiots. If you want to reach the widest cross-section of people they are going to be Dan Carlin levels of "average".
But as the top comment here shows, there's an insidious and perverse effect of scraping the bottom of the barrel. You might just start to like it. This person would be wise to be wary of such.
But how many videos on the same topic (in the same channel) can you regurgitate over and over? To give an example, how many videos on the topic of 'productivity' can you cram into the same channel? As many as possible it seems given the high subscriber counts for some channels that talk mostly about 'productivity'.
The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that the high subscriber counts for those channels prove clickbait titles work (as discussed in the video). The distinction between Type I and II clickbait titles in the video is useful though.
For programming channels, the clickbait tendency seems lower than other types of channels (based purely on anecdotal impressions). There is plenty of clickbait in the wider computing/technology channel space on YouTube.
This YouTube video is an honest look at creating content for YouTube from one Software Engineer (watch at 2x if the video is too long):
I almost burnt out creating software engineering content on YouTube, here is what I learned : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAJJORDSlho
Clickbait is effective where it can be employed without consequence. YouTube is one such domain.
It's inordinately effective where algorithms promote material based on short-term appeal rather than long-term benefit.
Where either or both of these factors are addressed, clickbait doesn't disappear entirely (it does hook into human psychology), but its effectiveness and power fall markedly.
YouTube does not support blocking of individual channels by users, or at least didn't as of the last time I used it whilst logged in (some years ago). If I'm presented with content that is absolute bilgewater, I cannot in any way indicate to the system "do not show me content from this source at all ever". This is the equivalent of a privately-functioning super-downvote, and is an exceedingly strong signal YouTUbe are denying themselves over content quality. Its availability would be among the very few possible reasons I'd consider accessing the service other than anonymously (and preferably through a front-end such as Invidious or FixYT, or commandline / terminal tools such as youtube-dl, mpv, or mps-youtube). Eventually, YouTube might themselves consider re-jiggering their recommendations away from channels which are consistently blocked.
In the absence, attention and misdirection games can be played, repeatedly, without risk.
(Oh: and quality contributors such as Derek Muller are also harmed by this as they're competing with scum-sucking bottom feeders for their own far superior productions.)
The other aspect is that the algorithm itself promotes short-term engagement at the cost of not only long-term value and quality, but genuine social harm, as has been well documented over recent years. (Including by Destin Sandler in an excellent 3-part series on online disinformation, the YouTube segment is here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4) This means that the existing psychological highjacking is further juiced algorithmically.
On desktop systems where the option is available to me, I use CSS hacks to remove both recommendations and comments from YouTube. The experience improves tremendously. (Stylish: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom-the... though the uBlock Origin elements remover can also be used for this.)
I've just had an exchange with dang about a recent submission and site which makes no bones about its dedication to pseudoscience and disinformation. Hacker News does have a policy of penalising (though not completely blocking) such sites. In our back-and-forth, dang offered (tongue-in-cheek, I'm pretty sure), that any strict "no bullshit" rule would render much of the present-day Internet inadmissable on HN. The longer I think that over, the more my response is "Yes, and that would be a Good Thing."
(I'm well aware if issues with truth-determination, epistemology, simple errors, politically-motivated censorship, and more. I'm referring here to publishers and authors who specifically and categorically defend posting of bullshit, though that's not the full extent of what I'd object to. I refer to Dante's Inferno in which it is the 8th of the 9 circles to which false counselors, falsifiers, hypocrits, schismatics, corrupt politicians, flatterers, pimps, and seducers are consigned. Violations of trust strike at the very heart of polity and civilisation.)
http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/dante-alighieris-i...
In my experience on the non-commerial, non-algorithmic, and distributed social platforms of Mastodon / the Fediverse and Diaspora, I find that whilst bullshit isn't entirely absent, its role is much reduced.
There is no algorithm to juice its spread.
On Mastodon, instances can elect to federate fully, partially, or not at all with others. Smaller instances can define and tune their interactions with others quite specifically. (The instance I'm on, toot.cat, run by a long-time online friend, has a substantial list of limited and silenced servers: https://toot.cat/about/more)
Diaspora dates from somewhat earlier, and has a more open philosophy toward content, though repeat disinformation, attacks and threats, and spam are dealt with in at least part. Among my contacts, we share information on block-worthy profiles based on various criteria. (Such informal lists are a frequent occurrence, especially in the absence of more powerful tools. They're not without their own risks and failure modes, including inadvertent or unwarranted inclusion.)
The larger point though is that clickbait is a phenomenon actively and intentionally supported by algorithmic social media to serve its short-term benefits. It does so at its own long-term cost.
Could propose a way to measure long-term benefit?
If you have an proposal for a metric, can it be used to make decisions which video to show now, without needing to access to information from the future?
Is current usage an indication of attraction (appeal) or of frustration (lack of a viable alternative)?
That said, the problematique of distinguishing short-term and long-term benefits (or harms) is a difficult one. It's inherently one that markets fail at fairly spectacularly, though so do numerous other systems.
I'd ... expect ... that there's some prior literature on this in the media space. It's also in large part the domain of aesthetics in philosophy.
There are a few institutions which have managed to retain a high quality standard over time. At the scale of the Internet, I'd nominate HN, and largely credit its moderation for that. Having principles, values, and an enforcement mechanism for those helps.
At a larger and longer-term scale, universities are among the very longest-lived and highly-durable human and social institutions. I'm not sure of all the reasons for this, and it's possible that in some cases this is a historical accident. It's also true that there have historicially been tremendous barriers to entry. Oxford and Cambridge in England / the UK had a chartered monopoly on all higher education until the 19th century. Even after the removal of that protection, they've remained highly durable as elite institutions.
They do have this now and I've blocked dozens of channels. It's the only thing that makes YT watchable. I do wish I could see the list of blocked channels though. Promotion for niche content on other channels is also not great.
After getting really annoyed with some unpleasant thumbnails that just kept showing up, I came up with the following ublock origin rule:
www.youtube.com##div.ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(ytd-channel-name a[href="/c/<channel-name>"])
His paradox of clickbait is very... interesting. I propose a similar paradox of used car salesmen: People say they hate it when used car salesmen lie to them, yet used car salesmen who lie the most sell the most cars!
Today though, if a used car salesman has some truly great cars that people really need but nobody buys them because Donald down the street is pulling people in to buy lemons with bald faced lies...well, that's sort of the conundrum we find ourselves in, isn't it?
To have any hope of fixing this we'd need to separate the curation of content from the hosting of content.
Daniel Pink describes this in detail in to "Sell is Human" Here's a short summary. https://fourminutebooks.com/to-sell-is-human-summary/
Or do you want just a list of videos from channels you've subscribed to?