It’s getting ridiculous. There’s one youtuber that swapped the thumbnail 4 times this week just to make people look at it again and think it was a different video. The worst part is that it sort of works, I keep looking at it then remembering I saw something very similar from the same channel name yesterday.
I hate this so damn much.
They’re not trying to trick people into re-watching videos they’ve already seen. YouTube generally does a pretty good job of not recommending those videos anyway. They’re simply testing which thumbnail/title brings the most traffic. It might seem petty but it makes a huge difference.
Yup, Scott Cramer recently did an interesting video that touches on this on his second channel, Scott is Struggling. Pretty cool if you’re into that kinda meta game of YouTube.
I’d recommend DeArrow to get rid of this. I’ve set it to just pull a thumbnail from the middle of the videos, and the titles are community edited to remove the massively clickbaity ones (if the channel is big enough).
It even comes in ReVanced so you can remove them on mobile too.
Just posted it too, great minds think alike!
LTT posted a video this week about the new push YouTube made to A/B test thumbnails: https://youtu.be/lHIWMmVoA44
Yeah, i think they’re testing what will drive click. I noticed channel like kurzgesagt will initially post it with very clickbaity thumbnail and title, then will swap to less clickbaity one. It’s annoying but i do understand why they do this. Makes me appreciate those who don’t join the enshittification race.
https://dearrow.ajay.app/ exactly fixes that.
It was created by SponsorBlock’s developer: https://ajay.app/
I know YouTube will rate thumbnails and tell you how the thumbnail is doing. I believe they also uploaded a feature where you can upload multiple and it will attempt to change them to see which works best. I see this a lot with Minecraft YouTubers (mostly Grian). It seems to be less trying to trick previous viewers and more so getting the highest rating in the YouTube panel. I think it is partially bs, as there are times I’ll scroll past a video not wanting to watch it at the exact moment and it seems like YouTube takes that as being a bad thumbnail.
There’s a Youtube extension for community-created thumbnails and titles that overrides this nonsense. Donation highly encouraged but I think you can get it for free.
Predatory, desperate and user hostile. It’s a great way to tell me you’d like me to unsubscribe (and I do).
Second layer of enshittification: content creators actively enshittifying their own content, to throttle a perceived weakness in the enshittification system itself - the almighty algorithm.
Yes. I hate it. The real reason isn’t necessarily to scam you into rewatching the same videos, but I’m sure they don’t mind that.
I’ve seen it happen. It’s a bit annoying because there was a music video an indie artist made that I really liked, and the creator kept changing the name of it and I couldn’t find it and thought it got deleted or something!
deleted by creator
