[ajayyy]

This was a purposeful choice to demonstrate the extent of the clickbait/sensationalism problem. Both channels have only changed their thumbnail and title style in the last few months, and previously had great titles and thumbnails.

Edit: To clarify, when I say "clickbait" here, I am using it as a neutral term referring to any materials used to convince someone to click on a link. I understand that it is kind of a loaded term and it is not used anywhere in the extension itself because of this.

The title of this post seems to be taken from the satire title on my YouTube video demo. If you install the plugin and view the video from there, there is a better title. It was meant as a demo of the extension.

[eddythompson80]

I like more descriptive titles! Don't know if I agree about the thumbnail though. Replacing a "You won't believe what they do here!!" with "A tour of X facility where Y is produced plus an interview with Z" is much better. It's more expressive, easier to find what you're looking for, and overall a definitive improvement for the viewer.

However, I'm not sure a random screenshot, or any still frame from the middle of a video is a better replacement for a custom thumbnail.

The only benefit I see of something like that is to explicitly reduce irritation of stupid thumbnails, not to improve your ability to find content you care for. And if you get emotionally worked up enough because of stupid youtube thumbnails that you must change them to something that's obviously just as random, you might need more meditation. It's just youtube, it's not worth it.

[ajayyy]

The plugin supports replacing only titles if you prefer.

[suddenclarity]

Looking at Tom Scott now I don't really see it. Most of the thumbnails seems to be him next to the object, an arrow highlighting it and a short fact about it. On the contrary, seeing the submarine in the thumbnail with this plugin kinda spoil the ending of his video.

[progbits]

He's retroactively changed thumbnails to match this new style.

Edit: this video shows the old and new styles: https://youtu.be/CcyTzhrN6bM

[pwdisswordfishc]

Educational videos aren’t drama. Spoilers are okay for those.

[pwdisswordfishc]

Even then, Tom Scott is still not the worst out there, which makes the demonstration less convincing. Show a channel full of shocked-face thumbnails, where the effect is much more visible, and now we’re talking.

[joemi]

I guess I haven't noticed any difference, and what I see on their channels today isn't what I consider clickbait. IMO it's at least a step or two from clickbait.

[Nathan2055]

While I’m just as annoyed about the clickbait problem as everyone else, it is worth noting that it’s hard to blame it on the individual YouTubers. If you don’t follow whatever the algorithm demands that given week, you’re unlikely to get very many views at all. Even subscription notifications are fed into the algorithm now, and YouTube has been proven to be perfectly willing to not send out notifications for videos it seems unworthy. This even affects subscribers who turned the bell on, a feature that was supposedly released to mitigate the first time they implemented that change by supposedly offering an “always force notifications for this channel’s uploads” option, but YouTube’s guidance now says that the bell only guarantees receiving all notifications generated by a channel while also stating that not all uploads will generate a notification.[1]

Linus Tech Tips famously ran an experiment several years ago (and I believe have rerun it a few times since then) and determined that, even though they hated doing it, videos which used clickbait titles and thumbnails got consistently got 20% higher engagement than ones that didn’t use clickbait.[2] I’ve also heard anecdotal numbers even higher than that, and there’s a knock-on effect as YouTube tends to promote channels with consistently high performance way more frequently (this is why big Game Theory uploads instantly and consistently show up in everyone’s recommendations).

This isn’t a complaint about your tool at all, don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to point out that most of these big channels are their creator’s primary business, and it’s gotten very difficult to be successful at YouTube without resorting to algorithm tricks like these.

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3382248

[2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA

Edit: Ah, yeah, I missed your “It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.” text on the page. You already probably know all of this.

I will add an addendum in response to “Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.” because I actually know how that got started.

About a year or two ago, the late great Minecraft streamer Technoblade ran into an issue where it turned out that one of the community-made thumbnails on one of his videos had used traced art. He quickly sourced a replacement piece and updated the thumbnail, but then quickly noticed something interesting happen: YouTube treated the thumbnail update almost like a new upload, and that video showed back up in people’s recommendations, accordingly with a massive bump in views. He tried this with a few other videos, sometimes changing the title as well, and got similar results.

Other YouTubers began to copy this strategy, and it was ultimately discovered that updating the title or thumbnail caused Google to “re-crunch” the video in terms of the algorithm, and applying the most popular current title and thumbnail styles were led to a serious increase in recommendations and views, even if the video was several years old by that point. Many YouTubers began to abuse this, updating their videos with “modern” metadata stylings, and since then it’s become standard practice for big YouTubers and has led to a serious increase in growth for them.

Once again, it’s an algorithm problem and not an individual YouTuber problem, but that’s what started the most recent trend of editing the metadata on old videos rather than just applying it to new uploads.