This sounds like a nice addon, sadly most of my YT consumption is done from my Nvidia Shield TV with STN, so I still get those annoying thumbnails I think (I have them in my home screen and that’s where I watch them or add them to the list to watch later within the Shield menu).
This feels like, IMHO, trying to put out a forest fire with a single bucket of water. Instead, we should have a platform that does not encourage making titles and thumbnails completely unrelated to the video’s content.
Smarttube already has something like this. It’s under User interface -> Where to grab card thumbnails. It replaces the thumb nail with a frame from either the beginning, mid or end of the video.
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.
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.
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.
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