This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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've used clickbait remover addon for more than a year now. I vastly prefer just a random screenshot as a thumbnail than those custom ones.
Clickbait remover uses YouTube's auto generated ones, which while are seemingly random, are not. They use some algorithm to target faces in exaggerated expressions.
DeArrwow uses actually random ones (and then a user can submit specific timestamps if there is a better one). It's noticeable better on many channels imo
(I made DeArrow)
I want to know when YT made it possible to have thumbnails be their own image and not taken from the video itself. I can scrub the video through every single frame and never actually find the thumbnails anymore.
Hell, sometimes the text in the thumbnail says something that isn't even discussed in the video at all. Those are the ones I hate the most. And I wouldn't necessarily want to remove the thumbnail, just because there are plenty of channels that make the thumbnail the actual title and the title is just... Bullshit, non-descriptive, a number, etc. Not all of them are bad. Civvie 11 and Internet Comment Etiquette do this. Erik probably does it on purpose both for the fact it works and also because he is a satire channel that regularly shits on these practices by showing how dumb they are. Civvie also satirizes YT's bullshit, but that's not really the prime focus of the channel.
this is brilliant!! thank you so much for creating this and also for giving us sponsorblock. you're the goat!!
For people wondering, the extension is also capable of changing clickbait title into a more descriptive one. You could also have a button toggle on each video to see the original title and thumbnail vs the changed one
Getting rid of "thumbnail face" is reason enough to use this add-on. Thanks for the recommendation!
Thing is, I know I won't click the ones on the left. The ones on the right actually look interesting.
... Which means I'll be promoting writing clickbaity titles by clicking on the videos and I'm not sure how I feel about that
Thank you for the link. It works great! Now I have the perfect YouTube with Ublock Origin + Sponsor Block + Dearrow + Return Youtube Dislike. It's crazy how many extensions you need to add to make YouTube bearable.... it's really time for a good competitor to take its place !
Great idea! You can't really get away from the clickbait thumbnails. As others said even good channels are heavily incentivised to do it.
It is already really difficult to find the stuff that is actually worth watching on YouTube. If you boycotted all clickbait thumbnails you would miss out on some otherwise great creators.
I'd much rather take clickbait thumbnails and baked in ads though as I can get around them with extensions and there is still a worthwhile video behind them.
When creators start doing low effort content like reaction videos, unboxings/product first impressions, or product "showcases" (ads) is when I usually know a channel has outlived its usefulness and stop watching altogether.
i would use this but some of the channels i watch the most number their thumbnails and dont do clickbait like this. if i could pick and choose per channel somehow it would be more helpful to me. i do agree with the sentiment though!
there's a whitelist!
You can do different settings per channel. So, you can allowlist channels, or even do the reverse, and only change titles/thumbnails on channels you don't like.
Awesome idea and the feedback suggests it works well, too. Any plans to support Firefox on Android?
Can vouch this extension is amazing. I started using it when it had 200 chrome downloads and it was already had many prominent creators in its database.
Title and thumbnail replacements are based on community votes, just like sponsorblock.
I have dearrow and I like it. I also installed Unhook, which "hides YouTube related videos, comments, shorts tab, suggestions wall, homepage recommendations, trending, and other distractions".
