I'm upset with YT's thumbnail picture trend. Anyone else?

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I've noticed that when browsing YouTube lately, the thumbnail/preview pictures for many videos seem highly manipulative. They either show someone's face expressing an intense emotion (e.g. disbelief, disgust, anger, etc.) or they have large bold letters stating something extreme (e.g. "This is crazy!" or "99.99999%"). I find it upsetting because it feels like clickbait and I do not like being manipulated. However, I understand this can partially be my fault because the algorithm tailors my feed based on my previous behaviors on the site. So, is anyone else seeing this trend or am I inadvertently causing my feed to suggest videos with these thumbnails based on my selections, either by selecting videos with these thumbnails or choosing videos with more subjects that have stronger emotions?

I'm honestly just starting to hate YT in general. But where else would I go to watch videos? Monopoly, anyone? :/
The whole adblock situation made me very angry. They now block ad blockers and force you to turn it off or pay for premium... because of course. I miss when YouTube Premium wasn't even a concept, much less an actual service in action.
I wasn't alive, much less on the internet at the time, but did you know that Google didn't always own YouTube? They bought it in 2006, and people agree it began going downhill progressively after that. Especially with the Adpocalypse and COPPA incidents in the late 2010s.

But to your point, yes. The amount of clickbait that is allowed to just be on the platform is frustrating. Though I don't see many of these videos on my feed personally, so try tailoring your feed. And if you click the three dots on a thumbnail, menu will come up and you can click "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested" (something to that effect).

I always use Invidious to avoid Google's crap:

https://inv.nadeko.net/feed/popular

Probably not much use for people who want to "follow" channels to get notifications for new content, or upload their own videos.

Also, YT occasionally breaks Invidious by changing its code, which is annoying, but so far the Invidious developers have always fixed the damage. When the videos won't play I use YTDLP or an online service to download the videos I want to see.

Good advice, but irrelevant to OP's complaints. YT creators use clickbaity thumbnails because it drives engagement and helps them in the algorithm. Third parties like Invidious can't do anything about that because they can't alter what the algorithm incentivizes or disincentivizes.

I'm not sure the other main competitor (Daily Motion) is much better.

There's also sites like Rumble and Odysee, but they're mostly filled with right-wing slop and even worse than YT when it comes to clickbait and ragebait.

^
I'd have to see one of these thumbnail things to know what you're talking about. I was assuming it was something that wouldn't happen with Invidious. I don't think I've ever seen one.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Mostly that list of videos "you may like" going down the right-hand side of the page? I hardly ever look at those, and in my case I've got the Invidious "proxy server" setting checked, which is supposed to mean that YouTube can't tell what I've watched, so that whatever it puts there, it won't be based on my behaviour. I see it's also possible to ad-block the element that generates that list, though it also loses some stuff from the left hand side that might be useful.

I usually stick to channel pages or I just decide what I want to see and find a link to it using a search engine. I don't pay much attention to the thumbnail pictures, I'm more of a text man myself. And clickbait and ragebait stopped working on me a long time ago, when I found out what they're up to. I usually just laugh when I see it. So all in all, no, thumbnails don't upset me, though I don't like the way they can be used to misrepresent a video. Everything's about marketing these days, and marketing is mostly about misrepresentation.

Ah, fair enough.

I watch a fair bit of car content, so I get videos with weird AI generated thumbnails of cars. Usually they resemble a mash-up of different generations of the same car, or like a bad resto-mod (modernized and half restoration, and half modified). Sometimes they'll be proclaiming some beloved nameplate is being resurrected, but often they'll be about a real historic model, but with an AI thumbnail to avoid licensing a picture.

One example that comes to mind was a video about the Ford Mustang SVT Cobra, but the thumbnail looked like a mix of the '93 (Fox platform), '94 (SN-95), '01 and '03 (New Edge facelifted SN-95). I assume this is the result of training the database on the entire 11 year run across three bodystyles.

With sports or wildlife videos often they'll just be poorly photoshopped, say like a hockey rink with a giant crack seemingly leading to nowhere or a gorilla strangling a lion; either way combined with a catchy headline.

I hate the YouTube thumbnails that show severe acne and all that's shown are tiny blackheads being popped.

Here are a few examples I got this morning











What's Invidious about?



I thought that the authors of the videos chose the thumbnails. Are those AI generated pictures made up by YouTube or are the authors uploaded AI generated thumbnails to represent their videos? If it's the former, that doesn't match my experience since it seems like the majority of the videos I see on my feed have thumbnails that are obviously chosen by the author. If it's the latter, why would authors upload AI generated pictures of vehicles that don't even exist? It seems like their audience would easily notice that they are fake and don't represent the content.



Yeah, bait and switch frustrates me.

Yes, that's the kind of thing that my brain would mostly ignore as being too obviously attention-seeking to deserve my time. Though the one about hunter-gatherers might have persuaded me to take a look, though with very little confidence in the chances of it containing anything worth bothering with.


It's an open-source and more private, ad-free frontend to YouTube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious
Wikipedia says that YT can still see your IP address, but the Invidious FAQ says that if you check Proxy Videos in the settings, you can avoid that:
https://docs.invidious.io/faq/#q-what-d ... th-youtube

The creators choose the thumbnails. I assume they don't care if they're noticed or not (they get complaints from parts of the audience) because it's low effort slop to begin with. AI voiceover, AI script, etc. I usually block them after awhile when I notice errors in the content.