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.
I loved old YouTube, these days i hardly go so maybe I’m not getting a good perspective but it seems every thumbnail is exactly the same, some brightly colored photo of a 20-something staring off camera with a comically open mouth. Am i missing something?
Yeah it’s really fucking cringey and dumb but it does work. Like, those exact thumbnails somehow get more clicks and views. I don’t get it, I don’t think I ever will, but they’re doing something right with this.
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.
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.
Part of me wants to say “why are you following channels that play games with you?”
But after reading the comments it seems like this may be an issue with yt as a whole.
Predatory, desperate and user hostile. It’s a great way to tell me you’d like me to unsubscribe (and I do).
This has even happening for years. I think Joe Scott was the first I noticed doing this.
Is that what’s going on?? There was a Kurzgesagt video that had one thumbnail on release, and then a completely different one a day or two later. I had no idea why they changed it.
Second layer of enshittification: content creators actively enshittifying their own content, to throttle a perceived weakness in the enshittification system itself - the almighty algorithm.
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.
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!
