- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.world
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Man this creator keeps on giving, making YouTube better than Google does so
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.
The problem with PeerTube is that there’s no built-in way for creators to get paid. If there are no ads or sponsors, then the only alternative is some kind of value for value system like what Podcasting 2.0 has. Until some kind of well integrated funding system gets built for PeerTube, creators really are not going to be incentivized to publish stuff on the platform.
At this point I’m down with paying a monthly subscription to a creator for content. I’ve never signed up for any creator’s pattern or anything because how the system is currently set up. I know some creators switched to posting less frequently because their more frequent posting appeared to be hurting their view count due to YouTube’s algorithm. I am so willing to pay a creator directly for them to go back to making more frequent content (and content they actually enjoy and not stuff just for views)
my only issue with this is eventually people will hit a financial limit and only be able to support a few creators, leaving others without funding
I’m following over 30 youtube channels, even at $1/month per channel that would still be $30/month which is too much for me honestly. not to mention the fact I would have to manage 30 different subscriptions
I’d like a youtube premium style subscription where I can specify a group of channels and the money gets distributed to them only
this way my money isn’t going to conspiracy channels, and I would only have a single subscription to manage
I subscribe to Nebula now.
Does nebula have enough content to be worth it now? I haven’t heard anyone with a sponsor spot for nebula in a few years now
I don’t know how much content would be “worth it” to most people. I just subscribed for Lindsay Ellis coming back, since she’s no longer uploading to YouTube due to the “git her b****, it’s her time” cancelling bullshit.
If you are willing to pay… then why not yt premium ? A cut goes to google, sure, but it goes to creators, based on your watch time, without falling into having to support 1-infinite channels etc. Plus no ads without any tricks
I already pay for YouTube premium but that doesn’t change how creators make content. The YouTube algorithm and its mystery has really changed how people make content over the years. There have been people I’ve watched for 10+ years now and it’s sucks to see them have to chase the algorithm to maintain their livelihood. If I could pay a creator directly to get more content, I gladly would
Best I can think of, would be implementing Librepay into PeerTube and make payments easy af.
https://tilvids.com has some reasonable ones, although they’re often just as well YouTubers, so you get similar clickbait, unfortunately.
Tilvids.com is probably the best place for good creators on PeerTube.
Ooh! Thanks for the tip! Dumb question, Peertube federates, right? Where you can get a feed of all subscribed channels from lots of instances on one instance? With a quick poke around I’m not seeing username@instancsname so I’m slightly thrown off, but I’ve also only been on the fediverse for like a month
PeerTube is also part of ActiviyPub, so yes it federates.
I know tilvids.com doesn’t federate directly with anyone, but you can subscribe to any channel on tilvids.com from any other PeerTube instance.
Don’t forget the PocketTube extension, which allows you to sort subscriptions into self-made categories. Which is shockingly not a default feature.
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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 did the opposite. I installed an addon that adds Mr Beast to every thumbnail.
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
Lmao
There’s also a Scott the Woz version, which I have installed
I’ve used it for exactly three minutes and this is already amazing. I hope it gets integrated into ReVanced and Newpipe.
I would love it on Piped, they already have sponsorblock
Never heard of piped. Filling the same niche as revanced?
Kind of. It’s a desktop web front-end to Youtube. I’m not sure whether it blocks in-stream ads (and I’m not turning off Ublock to find out), but it does basically reimplement the Youtube interface without many of its undesired elements.
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If you feel so strongly about the matter, feel free to not use it. Or better yet, contribute to the project to bring it up to feature parity.
As for the link - I guess whatever parses the URLs on Lemmy doesn’t recognise
.videoas a valid top-level domain. All I wrote waspiped.video, everything else was added by the website.deleted by creator
You just threw six paragraphs of vitriol at me, but I’m the one who’s screeching? Okay.
I mean, you’re not necessarily wrong, but for some people that is kind of just the appeal. It’s very obviously targetted at a very niche group of people, and if you’re not in that, of course you’ll dislike it
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More like Newpipe but it actually works (GURU MEDIATION) and has nice UI. I just found it yesterday on FDroid, I recommend it.
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.
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Honestly ReVanced is quite a bit more extensible than Vanced and works very reliably. Plus it’s open source and you can download it off GitHub. The manager makes downloading patches about as easy as installing Vanced with the manager a few years ago. I’m sure someone will add a derrow patch to Revanced very soon
I’ve used vanced and revanced since day one and always checked the stickied reddit post for any update notes before upgrading to the latest patch set. Revanced decided to migrate to Discord which is possibly the dumbest place they could have gone to (read: I don’t know how to use it to quickly find relevant patch notes and am angry about it), and I feel like updating to a new version is a crapshoot.
Do you know of a better place to find out which versions are compatible with the latest APK and where to get support if something breaks?
The Manager does a reasonable job identifying patches available for a given version. The Issues page on GitHub has a lot of the bugs laid out. The Releases tab also has the update notes and the website has the patch notes (including required version).
On the Discord, #announcements has the major update info. #support acts quite a lot like the old Reddit page where people post issues they’ve run into with threaded replies. I agree having a ReVanced Lemmy page would be better than Discord but Discord Posts are shockingly usable imo. Chat and Off-Topic are obviously horrifically unsearchable chatrooms but also aren’t the only resources on the server.
Much appreciated!
Really good extension, I’ve added it to my browser.
While some creators like Linus have said they dislike the clickbaity titles and thumbnails but they have to do it due to engagement that’s simply because the younger generations are the ones engaging with that content. As an older person I’d rather just have a to the point description of what I’m going to get.
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.
Yeah the titles are actually a huge draw for me.
I’m going to set the fallback thumbnail to the original instead of a random thumbnail. The randomly generated thumbnails are too out of context to be useful.
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.
It’s definitely an intelligent based issue, not necessarily age.
Maybe but I can only go with my own anecdotal experience and It tends to be the younger audience more attracted to them.
Of course, I fully admit I may be completely wrong.
There is a reason clickbait images and titles are used, they work. If they didn’t work, no one would use them.
You must think marketing is made of infallible geniuses. Just because it exists doesn’t make it good.
They didn’t say it was good, just that it’s what works; that’s why it’s everywhere.
Nobody said “good”, but if it keeps existing, it works or at least isn’t harmful. Bit like evolution.
Or there are people with an interest in keeping it that way.
I don’t think there’s any big conspiracy about YouTube titles, but let’s not pretend thing like wealth inequality still exist because they’re not harmful.
What “interest” would they have to keep it that way if it wasn’t working?
Wealth inequality exists because it works for the people who have the power to control it. In a way, it’s not harmful ENOUGH to change evolutionarily.
Are you serious? You literally answered your own question with the very next sentence.
What? The original argument was “Just because it exists doesn’t make it good.”, implying that it (click-bait thumbnails) doesn’t necessarily work. To which I said that the fact that it exists means it works. To which you seemed to object by saying that there may be people who have an interest in it existing - like they want it to exist despite it actually not working. I’m confused about what it is you’re saying.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good is what generates money. If it works it’s good
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.
But I don’t want to reward people that do this by watching their videos
I second this. The only reason click bait trash thumbnails work is people accepting it.
KIDS. accept it, that’s all who has all this time to watch these dumbed down videos , and what are they attracted to? Apparently gaping mouths.
Too late for that
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Love the idea, but just to be the devil’s advocate, I think it will just mask garbage videos. Currently, the clickbait thumbnails and titles are an indicator to blacklist a channel, without having to waste time watching it.
Unfortunately because of the way Youtube’s algorithm works, even high quality channels are buried if they don’t play the game.
Yeah, even good ones do it.
Got any examples? I don’t recall any actually quality and worthwhile channels that still use those dumb thumbnails.
Veritasium, he even has a video crunching the numbers as an explanation why he has to doit
Do you have a link to the video? I casually skimmed through his video list for the past year or so, but none of the titles jumped out at me for this.
Could also be a good example of why this extension sounds cool haha
Edit: Found it just a few more videos below here I stopped haha. “Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective” https://youtu.be/S2xHZPH5Sng
Yeah, that one I stopped hating clickbait so much after watching it, trying to become immune to it
LTT and SmarterEveryDay to name two.
All those channels in the screenshot in this post.
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.
CGP Grey is personally painful to me. He used to be a no-nonsense education youtube legend, but in the last few years he’s just maximised clickability - even going thorugh his whole back catalogue and changing titles and thumbnails.
For example, he made a great video about generative adversarial networks ~5 years ago but now its titled “How machines like ChatGPT learn” - despite coming out before GPT.
Pretty much every successful YouTube channel edits titles. It’s just part of the algorithm game now. You will often see videos cycle through several different titles shortly after release.
You have to blame YouTube and the people who click those garbage thumbnails
yep… that one is just rediculus
Tom Scott’s thumbnails aren’t that bad IMO, they’re pretty minimal in comparison to some other channels.
But they are so much worse than they were 6 months ago. He’s gone and ruined all of the old ones too with arrows and more deceptive titles.
The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.
Also be sure to get the restore YouTube dislike button extension
As well as uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock and BlockTube.
I believe YouTube is going to start detecting ad blockers, and there will be an arms race
heard its on chromium based browsers. just hope it does not come to Firefox.
I haven’t seen it happen on Brave browser yet. We’ll see how long that holds up.
So what you’re saying is that YouTube will become incompatible with firefox?
Not hard to disguise the browser you’re using. I use Mullvad (Firefox fork) and it will show up as Chrome on the host side.
Not worried about ad blockers, ytdlp is my sine qua non, figured they’d have blocked that years ago.
For a while, it was getting blocked regularly and a new update would come out that fixed it. Repeat.
Let’s be honest, they never took it seriously at all.
They could push a patch for encrypted streams to chrome and even firefox, basically you need a google account to watch videos, wouldn’t be optimal but they could get away with it.
Ytdl has login parameters. It would still get cracked.
Hulu with ads displays no ads when watching in a browser with uBlock origin. I don’t know if this is down to lazy design by Hulu or not but it’s another data point
One that they’ll never win
Sadly I can’t find Sponsorblock and BlockTube in the Firefox addon store (Android).
You have to use a custom add-on collection and Firefox Beta because Mozilla restricts which add-ons you can use
For this ridiculousness alone I quit Firefox. They absolutely do not care about their users. They also have been pushing a lot of shady things, like running experiments and tracking by default. And ff for Android still doesn’t have printing, 5 years after requesting to add it BACK
I’m curious to know what’s your usecase for BlockTube
Removing clickbait channels, foreign language channels, livestreams, channels I dislike, and whatever Youtube keeps recommending me over and over no matter how many times I hit “not interested”
Removing clickbait channels, foreign language channels, livestreams, channels I dislike, and whatever Youtube keeps recommending me over and over no matter how many times I hit “not interested”
This add-on needs to:
- Store unlimited amount of client-side data
- Access your data for sites in the googlevideo.com domain
- Access your data for sites in the youtube.com domain
- Access your data for sponsor.ajay.app
- Access your data for dearrow-thumb.ajay.app
- Access your data for www.youtube-nocookie.com
This add-on may also ask to: **Access your data for all websites
Is there a better option than for it to need unlimited amount of client-side data? Also, why “Access your data for all websites”?-
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
Thanks for your informative reply.
Bro, I seriously would marry you and make you food every day
Thank you for your work !
Access your data for all websites
It’s required to access iframes.
Without having investigated the plug in itself, going by just what you posted: That’s not likely to be a nefarious request, the plug-in needs to store data on your computer. Dealing with large number of titles it makes sense that it would cache things on your computer to minimise overtaxing their servers, to serve you more or less the same data over and over.
Maybe it’s for embedded videos? idk
Google’s algorithm has forced people into using click bait thumbnails and titles. If they don’t attract more views and subscribers, then their channels are not pushed.
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!
Are you implying that content creators don’t themselves want more views and subscribers? Of course they do!
“They only use thumbnails and titles that get views and subscribers because if they don’t… they won’t get views and subscribers since Google isn’t pushing their content.”
That’s what it sounds like you’re saying.
I think the point is that you can’t get more views by being genuine and honest, as the algorithm awards griftiness
You can, it’s just exceedingly difficult.
I mean, you just aren’t going to get as many views if you don’t. Veritasium has a video on it, regarding his rubber balls video.
Linus also mentioned it, he said he hates doing it but the clickbait videos significantly outperform others.
I never said otherwise, but it is possible to be successful without the clickbait. There are a few creators that have managed it. They would just make more money if they went with clickbait.
The point is that channel growth, clicks and interactions as a metric is used more for suggesting videos than relevancy and the likelihood that someone will watch a video to the end.
This creates a click bait arms race between creators.
isn’t the whole point of running a YouTube channel to get views and subscribers?
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You decide for yourself which videos to click. I usually only watch channels of which I know they will deliver.
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It’s real easy to solve this problem by just not pushing videos with text, arrows, symbols or reaction soyfaces in thumbnails. The issue is that they push all of that to the top and push everything else to the bottom.
The only way to win the game, is to not play in the first place unfortunately
There is also an extension that adds Mr Beast to every thumbnail
I kind of like seeing the clickbait, it lets me know which videos/channels arent worth my time. I know most use at least a little clickbait these days, but from the better channels its usually managable and still on topic (like the Real Engineering example shown here, whereas the others are complete clickbait that I would avoid).
Tbf I can’t think of any instance where Marques has click baited. At most they’re just obnoxious. But it’s been proven to work, as dumb as it is. Also Marques’s thumbnails are nowhere near as cringe as other Youtubers.
While I wish the days of 2007-2013 YouTube returned to the non clickbait and non garbage thumbnails, those days are over. I’d rather have the obnoxious thumbnails so I know which creators are trash.
I don’t know who this person is, but the example in the OP is definitely clickbait. “This phone is nearly perfect” but doesn’t say what the phone is, baiting you to click for the answer instead of just mentioning what phone we’re reviewing.
No judgement, it’s his business and he’s gotta make money, but saying he doesn’t do this just seems demonstrably wrong.
Yeah exactly, these kinds of titles make me not wanna click at all because I got no idea what it’s about (since it’s almost certainly not gonna be the perfect phone), so usually I don’t watch this kind of content at all. DeArrow really helped navigate around this crap and even LTT is kinda interesting to watch again because I finally know if a video is gonna be interesting to me BEFORE clicking it.
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Another point in his favour may be the clear view of the phone in the thumbnail, considering that his target audience may recognise it by appearance. However, I still think he should’ve just said it in the title for everyone else, and for audience members for whom his video is their first exposure to the model.
Regarding the last section, though, I see clickbait titles less as ‘it doesn’t cover every nuance of the video’ and more ‘the title is overly reductive, genuinely misleading or pointlessly vague’, unless there’s artistic reasons it’s that way. A review title should name the reviewed product imo; it barely increases its length and lets people decide better whether the content’s worth their time without wasting any of it.
I also don’t think a title summarising a video’s central point well makes it bad. A good video doesn’t just repeat different wordings of the title for 10 minutes, it goes into specifics to argue why that is. I sometimes see nuanced, heavily researched video essays get some comment like ‘saved you half an hour, guys! (the main point in one sentence!)’ because the video didn’t… have some massive plot twist, I guess? And I don’t get why people would approach informational content that way. It feels anti-intellectual. Maybe the Silent Hill nurses are a work of art; the video would only be bad if it can’t argue that well or has a lot of fluff between the points.
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(Adding to the other comment, last thing I swear)
I should be clear that I think MKBHD is chill, this is pretty minor, and I can’t blame creators for doing it when youtube’s algorithm is brutal and more and more content is fighting for our declining attention spans.
It sucks that people have to be a little baity to survive on there. I think it’s fair for people to be annoyed by it anyway, but we should direct most of that negativity at the platform and extreme examples.
(Sorry for the above being sent multiple times, I had a network issue.)
You’re suggesting larger changes to the title. I’m only saying ‘this phone’ should be replaced with ‘the pixel 69’ or whatever the model’s name is. ‘The pixel 69 is almost perfect’ is short, informative (edit: by which I mean informative enough about the video’s topic), more informative to anyone that hasn’t seen the phone before, and draws people in: why’s it almost perfect? That’s worth clicking to find out, and the details aren’t something you’d expect someone to cram into a general review title.
I fully agree that the title should encourage people to keep reading, but in my opinion ‘basic writing’ is keeping a balance between both goals of a title. The examples of clickbait I’ve given involve people optimising the title for attracting views while neglecting the goal of reasonably accurate description. If taken too far it could start making viewers feel patronised, and if I encounter a video with misleading clickbait I assume the rest of their videos will waste my time as well and avoid them. (Edit 3: I increasingly assume the same about vague titles from unfamiliar channels as well.)
If your thesis statement is the entirety of your argument then you are wasting everyone’s time.
The last part of my previous comment was about this; maybe we’re miscommunicating by using ‘summarise’ differently, as in ‘covers every point’ vs ‘vague overview’? I’ve been saying titles should do the latter because that’s what this entire conversation has been about. Nobody thinks every point of a review should be included in its title, just that the title should be reasonably descriptive about the central thesis or central question being explored. Quoting myself:
A good video doesn’t just repeat different wordings of the title for 10 minutes, it goes into specifics to argue why that is.
the video would only be bad if it can’t argue [the title’s statement] well or has a lot of fluff between the points.
TL;DR: there’s a balance to be struck between making the title descriptive and drawing clicks, and talking about full summaries as titles is a bit of a strawman.
EDIT 2: Removed some italics because they made this sound unintentionally patronising. Apologies, haha.
Another point in his favour could be the clear view of the phone in the thumbnail, considering that his target audience may recognise it by appearance. However, I still think he should’ve just said it in the title for everyone else, and for audience members for whom his video is their first exposure to the model.
Regarding the last section, though, I see clickbait titles less as ‘it doesn’t cover every nuance of the video’ and more ‘the title is overly reductive, genuinely misleading or pointlessly vague’, unless there’s artistic reasons it’s that way. A review title should name the reviewed product imo; it barely increases its length and lets people decide better whether the content’s worth their time without wasting any of it.
I also don’t think a title summarising a video’s point well makes it bad. A good video doesn’t just repeat different wordings of the title for 10 minutes, it goes into specifics to argue why. I sometimes see nuanced, heavily researched video essays get a comment like ‘saved you half an hour, guys! (the main point in one sentence!)’ because the video didn’t… have some massive plot twist, I guess? And I don’t get why people would approach informational content that way. It feels anti-intellectual. Maybe those Silent Hill nurses are a work of art; the video would only be bad if it can’t argue that well or has a lot of fluff between the points.
I have not mentioned the thumbnail, only the title.
I would argue that this sort of clickbait is not really intended for person 1. A bit for person 2 but probably most for person 3, the guy looking at YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The title purposefully omits information to draw the reader in.
Again, I’m making no arguments about this being a bad or immoral thing to do, I’m simply saying that is a classic clickbait tactic. It’s his job to draw in viewers and that’s what he’s doing.
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Another point in his favour may be the clear view of the phone in the thumbnail, considering that his target audience may recognise it by appearance. However, I still think he should’ve just said it in the title for everyone else, and for audience members for whom his video is their first exposure to the model.
Regarding the last section, though, I see clickbait titles less as ‘it doesn’t cover every nuance of the video’ and more ‘the title is overly reductive, genuinely misleading or pointlessly vague’, unless there’s artistic reasons it’s that way. A review title should name the reviewed product imo; it barely increases its length and lets people decide better whether the content’s worth their time without wasting any of it.
I also don’t think a title summarising a video’s central point well makes it bad. A good video doesn’t just repeat different wordings of the title for 10 minutes, it goes into specifics to argue why that is. I sometimes see nuanced, heavily researched video essays get some comment like ‘saved you half an hour, guys! (the main point in one sentence!)’ because the video didn’t… have some massive plot twist, I guess? And I don’t get why people would approach informational content that way. It feels anti-intellectual. Maybe the Silent Hill nurses are a work of art; the video would only be bad if it can’t argue that well or has a lot of fluff between the points.
Tbf I can’t think of any instance where Marques has click baited.
Titles picked within the last 4 months:
- This Phone is Nearly Perfect!
- How Does Sony Keep Doing This?
- I Tried a Secret Google Project!
- What is Happening with Samsung’s Camera?
- iPad Killer or Clone?
- Apple’s Forbidden Words
- This is the Dumbest Product I’ve Ever Reviewed
- This Smartphone Hardware is Getting Crazy!
This is what parasocial relationships do to you…
I installed this app and looked up some Mr. Beast vids as a test. If anything, it made more tempted to check out his vids just because I don’t have to see his annoying giant soyface in every thumbnail now.
lmao, who unironically says soyface?
If you’ve got another way to describe that facial expression Mr. Beast does in all his thumbnails, then I’m all ears.
Jumpscare Scream.
Also. Hi All ears, im toastedenough
=O
True, you’re right.
.
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.
I understand but I don’t have to like it or see it on my stream. I’m sure they won’t miss the fraction of missed views from people like me if they’re making 30% more from others.
Thumbnail and first 5-10 seconds for auto play or preview play or whatever it’s called is super important. I post some videos just for fun and can see the boost when I take effort in those two things.
