This sounds like a nice addon, sadly most of my YT consumption is done from my Nvidia Shield TV with STN, so I still get those annoying thumbnails I think (I have them in my home screen and that's where I watch them or add them to the list to watch later within the Shield menu).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
