[lucideer]

My concern is mainly just missing stuff I may be interested in in favour of uninteresting videos because the luck of the draw picked a highly relevant/irrelevant frame. Yes this is a 1st-world problem but this is Youtube.

I'd like to think I could select videos on title alone but if that's your route then just remove rather than replace thumbs (and text can still mislead).

To put it another way: even if we agree the current thumbs are bad (annoying, misleading), are the replacements better (or just irrelevant). Most people like to judge things on intent, but intentionally bad is still better than unintentionally worse.

And in the end, I can much more easily develop intuition to spot intentionally deceptive common human patterns than spotting unintentionally irrelevant random automated patterns.