YouTube says the policy will combat “egregious” clickbait that misleads viewers, with a particular focus on videos related to “breaking news” or “current events.” The company’s examples of egregious clickbait include a video with the title “the president resigned!” that doesn’t actually address a resignation or a “top political news” thumbnail attached to a video with no news content.
This is only going to target garbage-level content. You can still expect the same clickbait-style titles and thumbnails from established creators
YouTube will never “crack down” on these guys. They are their money-makes and can do whatever the fuck the want. Clickbait on huge channels is YouTube’s bread and butter, even if people just click to comment that the creator sucks, that’s still engagement and means there is more money in the ad bids.
I think you’ve correctly identified their self-interest over altruism, but you’ve misidentified the internal value of discouraging clickbait. YouTube is a treasure trove for building training datasets, and its value increases when metadata like thumbnails, descriptions, titles, and tags can be trusted.
It’s the AI gold rush; notice how this coincides with options to limit or disable third-party training but not first-party training? It coincides but is definitely not a coincidence.
Yeah, this is not even really targeting clickbait, more like putting restrictions on openly malicious content.
This will address extreme and obvious falsehoods but I still encounter clickbait of the more pedestrian kind everywhere I go. “You’re using your table saw WRONG” or “the 1 table saw trick 99% of people don’t know” etc.
I consider this clickbait: it creates a false sense of urgency and doesn’t convey any information in itself. What is this one trick? Oh I already knew that one, but I had to watch the video to realize that.
It wastes a lot of time and makes things harder to search for. And often these clickbait headlines are not in the video headline where YT can easily scan them, but in the thumbnail graphic in huge letters, where it’s probably harder to automate any moderation for.
I pay for YT premium but this aspect of the experience still feels ad-like and cheap.
I’ve noticed these super annoying news flashes that say like Beyonce fleeing US and shit like that. Super long videos too and they’re all trash. Makes it hard to get real news on it
Makes it hard to get real news on it
Well there’s your problem. Why the fuck are you trying to get news on Youtube?!
The fix was there, but they removed it. The dislike button. Fucking unbelievable how stupid these companies are.
The fix was there, but they removed it.
Return YouTube Dislikes still exists. The likes and dislikes of RYD users are stored in an external database, so Google cannot take them away.
Unless YouTube is using that data to not recommend crappy videos, then it’s completely pointless. If YouTube was going to use that data, then they would, oh, I don’t know, maybe still have a dislike button?
Unless YouTube is using that data to not recommend crappy videos, then it’s completely pointless.
YouTube never did that anyway. YouTube recommends videos on user engagement. Thumb buttons in any direction are engagement. They have slightly hidden “don’t recommend video/channel” options for that.
What RYD does is to show what others think.
It’s completely inaccurate though. It can show massive amounts of faux dislikes that don’t actually exist. This has been confirmed with youtubers, who still see the dislike ratio on their backend.
It’s completely inaccurate though. It can show massive amounts of faux dislikes that don’t actually exist. This has been confirmed with youtubers, who still see the dislike ratio on their backend.
I’d say the “actual” dislike numbers are completely inaccurate because what’s the point of disliking a video in an environment where the dislikes don’t count?
RYD extrapolates the like/dislike ratio as stored on their own server to the like numbers as displayed by YouTube. That’s not secret information. They spell it out in their FAQ.
If anything, if you like more representative numbers, get more people to install RYD.
This is not official and not many people (relatively speaking) know about it. My wife, for example, still uses the official YouTube app on her iPhone with all of its ads and garbage.
This is not official
Neither was the previous workaround which IIRC required some JavaScript trickery with the web player.
So, they created an algorithm that will only reward clickbait and completely ignore honest titles and thumbnails, then complain about their platform being one giant clickbait? Huh…
Or, you can bring back the dislike button and stop promoting videos with high dislike ratios.
Do comments first. There’s so much spam that almost looks legit because of how many upvotes they have.
And actual scams with 300+ upvotes. Not just copied comments that get edited layer, but entire chains directing people to whatsapp numbers.
I’d still take scam comments over “who is still listening in 2024?!” For a super popular song that came out in 2023 or for a timeless classic like Michael Jackson’s thriller
Better title: “YouTube is cracking down on click bait - here’s how”
