Man this creator keeps on giving, making YouTube better than Google does so
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.
At this point I’m down with paying a monthly subscription to a creator for content. I’ve never signed up for any creator’s pattern or anything because how the system is currently set up. I know some creators switched to posting less frequently because their more frequent posting appeared to be hurting their view count due to YouTube’s algorithm. I am so willing to pay a creator directly for them to go back to making more frequent content (and content they actually enjoy and not stuff just for views)
my only issue with this is eventually people will hit a financial limit and only be able to support a few creators, leaving others without funding
I’m following over 30 youtube channels, even at $1/month per channel that would still be $30/month which is too much for me honestly. not to mention the fact I would have to manage 30 different subscriptions
I’d like a youtube premium style subscription where I can specify a group of channels and the money gets distributed to them only
this way my money isn’t going to conspiracy channels, and I would only have a single subscription to manage
I subscribe to Nebula now.
Does nebula have enough content to be worth it now? I haven’t heard anyone with a sponsor spot for nebula in a few years now
I don’t know how much content would be “worth it” to most people. I just subscribed for Lindsay Ellis coming back, since she’s no longer uploading to YouTube due to the “git her b****, it’s her time” cancelling bullshit.
If you are willing to pay… then why not yt premium ? A cut goes to google, sure, but it goes to creators, based on your watch time, without falling into having to support 1-infinite channels etc. Plus no ads without any tricks
I already pay for YouTube premium but that doesn’t change how creators make content. The YouTube algorithm and its mystery has really changed how people make content over the years. There have been people I’ve watched for 10+ years now and it’s sucks to see them have to chase the algorithm to maintain their livelihood. If I could pay a creator directly to get more content, I gladly would
Best I can think of, would be implementing Librepay into PeerTube and make payments easy af.
Tilvids.com is probably the best place for good creators on PeerTube.
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
PeerTube is also part of ActiviyPub, so yes it federates.
I know tilvids.com doesn’t federate directly with anyone, but you can subscribe to any channel on tilvids.com from any other PeerTube instance.
https://tilvids.com has some reasonable ones, although they’re often just as well YouTubers, so you get similar clickbait, unfortunately.
adblocker, sponsorblock and this
I’d even add Unhook (hide Trending, Shorts, Merch, replace “Home Feed” with subscriptions etc.) and Age Restriction Bypass (avoid the need to verify your account with a credit card). I also use Clickbait Remover. It essentially does the same as DeArrow without the crowdsourcing, which is already good enough for me.
Don’t forget the PocketTube extension, which allows you to sort subscriptions into self-made categories. Which is shockingly not a default feature.
I mean yes but also it’s not that hard. Google is not trying to give you a great experience, they’re trying to drive clicks to ads.
I did the opposite. I installed an addon that adds Mr Beast to every thumbnail.
I need a mod for my phone my that just makes every icon a picture of some character with their mouth wide open, yelling.
(refer to this reddit post for what I mean)
Calculator? Someone yelling.
Settings? Someone yelling.
Camera app? Believe it or not, someone yelling.
i tried that too, its one of my favourite extensions
There’s also a Scott the Woz version, which I have installed
There is also an extension that adds Mr Beast to every thumbnail
Yooo, can I have a source for this? Just for research purposes
I’ve used it for exactly three minutes and this is already amazing. I hope it gets integrated into ReVanced and Newpipe.
I would love it on Piped, they already have sponsorblock
Never heard of piped. Filling the same niche as revanced?
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.
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If you feel so strongly about the matter, feel free to not use it. Or better yet, contribute to the project to bring it up to feature parity.
As for the link - I guess whatever parses the URLs on Lemmy doesn’t recognise
.videoas a valid top-level domain. All I wrote waspiped.video, everything else was added by the website.deleted by creator
You just threw six paragraphs of vitriol at me, but I’m the one who’s screeching? Okay.
I mean, you’re not necessarily wrong, but for some people that is kind of just the appeal. It’s very obviously targetted at a very niche group of people, and if you’re not in that, of course you’ll dislike it
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More like Newpipe but it actually works (GURU MEDIATION) and has nice UI. I just found it yesterday on FDroid, I recommend it.
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.
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Honestly ReVanced is quite a bit more extensible than Vanced and works very reliably. Plus it’s open source and you can download it off GitHub. The manager makes downloading patches about as easy as installing Vanced with the manager a few years ago. I’m sure someone will add a derrow patch to Revanced very soon
I’ve used vanced and revanced since day one and always checked the stickied reddit post for any update notes before upgrading to the latest patch set. Revanced decided to migrate to Discord which is possibly the dumbest place they could have gone to (read: I don’t know how to use it to quickly find relevant patch notes and am angry about it), and I feel like updating to a new version is a crapshoot.
Do you know of a better place to find out which versions are compatible with the latest APK and where to get support if something breaks?
The Manager does a reasonable job identifying patches available for a given version. The Issues page on GitHub has a lot of the bugs laid out. The Releases tab also has the update notes and the website has the patch notes (including required version).
On the Discord, #announcements has the major update info. #support acts quite a lot like the old Reddit page where people post issues they’ve run into with threaded replies. I agree having a ReVanced Lemmy page would be better than Discord but Discord Posts are shockingly usable imo. Chat and Off-Topic are obviously horrifically unsearchable chatrooms but also aren’t the only resources on the server.
Much appreciated!
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If a channel that makes clickbait garbage thumbnails pops up I just click to not have the channel recommended again, and that has worked pretty well.
Clickbait works and I encourage all YouTubers that I watch to do so. The more people they reach, the more money they earn and the better their content can become. Outside of a minor annoyance to the superusers, using clickbait titles and thumbnails is just good business. Even the very best content producers in their category (Veritasium in educational content, MKBHD for tech reviewing are great examples) use it because they have to: but lots of them dislike doing it. Veritasium has two great videos about it: clickbaiting is a HUGE benefit to any YouTube channel, a good thumbnail alone can account for 20-50% of all views on a video.
Imagine it like this: every time you pay for anything, you get a free 30% discount if you pinch yourself in the arm. Wouldn’t you always just do it? Who cares about the minor annoyance.
That’s what it’s like for the content creator. Put 30 minutes of work into a clickbait thumbnail + title and it’s 30% more views on every single video.
I understand but I don’t have to like it or see it on my stream. I’m sure they won’t miss the fraction of missed views from people like me if they’re making 30% more from others.
Thumbnail and first 5-10 seconds for auto play or preview play or whatever it’s called is super important. I post some videos just for fun and can see the boost when I take effort in those two things.
I never thought it could be possible to do that, thank you so much for this and making YouTube a better place.
If someone knows how to get rid of shorts in the search results I’d be most grateful 👌
There is an add on, and it works well! Firefox add-on
Thank you so much, I can’t wait to try this and get rid of those!
Replying to find this comment again later.
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.
I might get it for the titles alone. The clickbaity thumbnails don’t really bother me, but I’d like to have a good title at least.
Yeah the titles are actually a huge draw for me.
I’m going to set the fallback thumbnail to the original instead of a random thumbnail. The randomly generated thumbnails are too out of context to be useful.
I don’t think it can be said to conclusively be an age issue. I assure you that many Boomers and older Xers love clickbait titles.
It’s a more granular demographic than just age.
It’s definitely an intelligent based issue, not necessarily age.
Maybe but I can only go with my own anecdotal experience and It tends to be the younger audience more attracted to them.
Of course, I fully admit I may be completely wrong.
There is a reason clickbait images and titles are used, they work. If they didn’t work, no one would use them.
You must think marketing is made of infallible geniuses. Just because it exists doesn’t make it good.
They didn’t say it was good, just that it’s what works; that’s why it’s everywhere.
Nobody said “good”, but if it keeps existing, it works or at least isn’t harmful. Bit like evolution.
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 “interest” would they have to keep it that way if it wasn’t working?
Wealth inequality exists because it works for the people who have the power to control it. In a way, it’s not harmful ENOUGH to change evolutionarily.
Are you serious? You literally answered your own question with the very next sentence.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good is what generates money. If it works it’s good
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.
We need this on Revanced too. Also on NewpipeXSponserblock.
Oh lord yes, I was scrolling through the replies in the hope of finding a ReVanced reference.
Glad that I fulfiled your satisfaction
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.
Unfortunately because of the way Youtube’s algorithm works, even high quality channels are buried if they don’t play the game.
Yeah, even good ones do it.
Got any examples? I don’t recall any actually quality and worthwhile channels that still use those dumb thumbnails.
Veritasium, he even has a video crunching the numbers as an explanation why he has to doit
Do you have a link to the video? I casually skimmed through his video list for the past year or so, but none of the titles jumped out at me for this.
Could also be a good example of why this extension sounds cool haha
Edit: Found it just a few more videos below here I stopped haha. “Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective” https://youtu.be/S2xHZPH5Sng
Yeah, that one I stopped hating clickbait so much after watching it, trying to become immune to it
LTT and SmarterEveryDay to name two.
All those channels in the screenshot in this post.
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.
Tom Scott’s thumbnails aren’t that bad IMO, they’re pretty minimal in comparison to some other channels.
But they are so much worse than they were 6 months ago. He’s gone and ruined all of the old ones too with arrows and more deceptive titles.
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.
You have to blame YouTube and the people who click those garbage thumbnails
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.
The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.
But I don’t want to reward people that do this by watching their videos
I second this. The only reason click bait trash thumbnails work is people accepting it.
KIDS. accept it, that’s all who has all this time to watch these dumbed down videos , and what are they attracted to? Apparently gaping mouths.
Too late for that
I just use the tried and true method of unsubscribing and watching another channel
“Don’t recommend this channel” has been a life saver
You’ll run out of channels fast, trying to do that.
You’d think, but honestly I’ve still found a helluva large amount of good channels that don’t do this.
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The sad thing is that even good channel are driven to do this bullshit because people do really watch those more often. How can we be such a brainless hive mind…
E.g. Marques Brownlee actually does do decent reviews.
had me until the last line
marques only does impressions and doesn’t do reviews
the only review he has done is the iPhone 13 pro 6 months later
every other video is made with 2-3 weeks of usage(he gets device a few weeks before launch and uses beta version of software to make “reviews”)
That’s the way consumer reviews have always worked. Short of a few exceptions, most professional reviews for any hardware are impressions. If it took 6 months to review a washing machine, it would take a lot of people to keep up. Same with phones, same with video games. It’s nice when someone can give a long term review, but if every phone he reviewed took 6 months to review, he’d have 1-2 videos a year.
phones gets updates over months which enhance or worsens the experience of the device
eg pixel 6 got worse with updates and it didn’t even get updated for 2-3 months I think and various poco phones had bad motherboard issues which only showed up after a few months
in fact, it was common for pixel series to get widespread hardware issues like green screen on pixel 2, screen not placed evenly on pixel 5 and more, even though it got good “reviews” on YouTube because they were impressions
users buy based on reviews thinking the device is good but that is just an impression
and coming to the last line, why do you need to be bombarded with review videos?
its ok if we get 1-2 device reviewIf you are wanting reviews to take 6 months, there won’t be any reviews of the phone until half way through their sales cycle. I agree things change over time. I have a Pixel 5 and on release it had horrible brightness sensing problems thanks to the under screen brightness sensor, and that got a lot better after a couple of months. But it is unrealistic to expect people to wait 6 months to see if a phone might be good. That was doubley true when most phones only had 2 years of support tops.
It’s a little better now, but if you aren’t buying a phone when it first hits the market you are shaving time off the life of the phone, if you are like me and camp on a phone for years. Heck, for a long time cell phone carriers were selling phones who’s EOL had already come, it was bad.
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.
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For specific types of video where they are mostly similar looking (For example, online TCGs and such), it can be hard to get a thumbnail you want that looks different than other videos of the same type, so people were adding long segment with the static image of thumbnail they wanted at the end of the video for a workaround, until Google finally relented and just let people use the thumbnails they want.
I don’t have a problem with this, I just try not to watch videos with clickbait thumbnails and/or titles, because if they think they “had” to do that, then their content usually isn’t very good to begin with.
I think it’s really telling when creators have different thumbnails on Nebula vs YouTube. It could even be interpreted as a scream for help “this is the thumbnail I wanted but this is the thumbnail that puts food on my table”
True, but even if YouTube forced you take a screenshot from the video people would add the image in the last frame similar to what they sometimes do for YT shorts.
I suppose to drive engagement with fake thumbnails, the same thing they do when they put irrelevant things into your search results (thankfully that one is easily blocked by a uBlock filter).
this is brilliant!! thank you so much for creating this and also for giving us sponsorblock. you’re the goat!!
But then how do I filter out clickbaity videos?
This…if they want to make their thumbnail as pathetic as possible, let them. It’s much easier to spot the junk this way.
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
the only way to get out of the cycle is to not open any gates that traps you into it
its like withdrawal, yeah it sucks but its better for you in the long run
