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
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.
Best I can think of, would be implementing Librepay into PeerTube and make payments easy af.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have to blame YouTube and the people who click those garbage thumbnails
The Real Engineering video used as an example here is excellent.
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.
this is brilliant!! thank you so much for creating this and also for giving us sponsorblock. you’re the goat!!
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
For people wondering, the extension is also capable of changing clickbait title into a more descriptive one. You could also have a button toggle on each video to see the original title and thumbnail vs the changed one
Agreed. I like the title change, but the chance of not being able to remember the actual title of a video when I need to is not worth it.
What does remembering the actual title mean if they change it every five minutes ;)
But yea, a DeArrow search engine would solve that problem
Fair, but the YouTubers I usually watch tend not to do the whole clickbait thing, so this is really a non-issue for me 🤣
Getting rid of “thumbnail face” is reason enough to use this add-on. Thanks for the recommendation!
Also be sure to get the restore YouTube dislike button extension
As well as uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock and BlockTube.
I believe YouTube is going to start detecting ad blockers, and there will be an arms race
heard its on chromium based browsers. just hope it does not come to Firefox.
I haven’t seen it happen on Brave browser yet. We’ll see how long that holds up.
So what you’re saying is that YouTube will become incompatible with firefox?
Not hard to disguise the browser you’re using. I use Mullvad (Firefox fork) and it will show up as Chrome on the host side.
Not worried about ad blockers, ytdlp is my sine qua non, figured they’d have blocked that years ago.
For a while, it was getting blocked regularly and a new update would come out that fixed it. Repeat.
Let’s be honest, they never took it seriously at all.
They could push a patch for encrypted streams to chrome and even firefox, basically you need a google account to watch videos, wouldn’t be optimal but they could get away with it.
Hulu with ads displays no ads when watching in a browser with uBlock origin. I don’t know if this is down to lazy design by Hulu or not but it’s another data point
One that they’ll never win
Sadly I can’t find Sponsorblock and BlockTube in the Firefox addon store (Android).
You have to use a custom add-on collection and Firefox Beta because Mozilla restricts which add-ons you can use
For this ridiculousness alone I quit Firefox. They absolutely do not care about their users. They also have been pushing a lot of shady things, like running experiments and tracking by default. And ff for Android still doesn’t have printing, 5 years after requesting to add it BACK
I’m curious to know what’s your usecase for BlockTube
Removing clickbait channels, foreign language channels, livestreams, channels I dislike, and whatever Youtube keeps recommending me over and over no matter how many times I hit “not interested”
Removing clickbait channels, foreign language channels, livestreams, channels I dislike, and whatever Youtube keeps recommending me over and over no matter how many times I hit “not interested”
Thank you for the link. It works great! Now I have the perfect YouTube with Ublock Origin + Sponsor Block + Dearrow + Return Youtube Dislike. It’s crazy how many extensions you need to add to make YouTube bearable… it’s really time for a good competitor to take its place !
A different platform would also be plagued by clickbait and sponsor messages.
And add a Youtube shorts block while you’re at it.
Don’t forget Enhancer for YouTube; it’s an absolute essential in my book.
