I have found this video to be cope, it's trying to justify clickbait as "making an effective title". I think it's important to have in mind what was the purpose of the internet: to accelerate the access to relevant information so that the world can move forward faster. Clickbaiting people to watch 10 minutes videos for tiddly little bits of information is a colossal waste of potential there.
Tough to put in words really. Maybe it could be rephrased to "I found that he is trying to legitimize clickbait", however the second part of the sentence says that too.
Some of your criticism seems to be directed at video length and not a clickbaity title. If a video takes 10 minutes to tell me a single piece of information, the title isn't the issue with that video.
Maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse here, but what if there's a human reason why 10m videos are popular. Maybe 10 minutes is just the minimum time needed to get across a non-trivial idea to a broad audience. Sure, the platform itself encourages that length implicitly but maybe that's not an arbitrary decision and is based on the human capacity to absorb information.
10 minutes is the original minimum video length youtube required before you could place midroll ads. It's now 8 minutes, but 10 is still a goal that many "creators" aim for. What it mostly results in is low-quality, low-information videos that are padded out to be just long enough to show you:
- pre-roll ads
- embedded sponsored content
- plug for your patreon/other videos
- reminder to like/subscribe/comment
- a tiny nugget of actual content SOMETIMES
- mid-roll ads
- post-roll ads
I agree that 10 minutes feels about right if you were actually trying to convey a good chunk of information in good faith, but that's just not what happens on youtube. Maybe 10 minutes was a good threshold for midroll ads for the same reason that it would have been a good threshold for quality videos.
Videos like the linked one, while technically longer, just result in more and more mid-roll ads. In fact while attempting to watch this one, I got just past his embedded sponsorship plug, when youtube ambushed me with the "Ads in 3... 2... 1..." type of ad that makes it impossible to tell just how much of the video is compromised by ads before watching it.
10-25 minutes or so seems like the sweet spot for a lot of podcasts, informational videos, presentations, and the like when they're genuinely trying to inform/entertain. It's hard to really communicate a lot of information or have a meaningful discussion in a shorter period of time unless it's very focused (how to...) and a lot of those would better be text and a photo. And a lot of hour long interviews etc. tend to feel like they go on too long.
Feels right to me. You can sink that amount of time into something without really feeling like it's a large commitment of time or energy, while also feeling satisfied if you liked it. It's just a shame that on youtube, the advertising pressure erodes such content away.
While there are logistical issues with shorter presentations at multi-track physical events, I've come to think that 25-30 minutes is a better sweet spot for conference presentations than 45-50 minutes. (With the exception of workshops/tutorials in most cases.)
And it's where I've ended up with my podcasts. Less than 12 or so feels like you're barely getting started and get past about 30 and, as a listener, I'm generally losing interest. It's no coincidence that longer professionally produced podcasts almost always have segments or otherwise break up the content.
I think within the video in question is the beginnings of a good justification for this. He views his job as getting his educational content in front as many people that can learn from it as possible.
Part of that is making sure he can afford to do so, so we should consider holistically whether breaking from the ad roll time format is better in the end or not. if he can keep up the quantity and quality of videos, then maybe it's worth breaking with that format. If he can't, then maybe it's not.
The is a similar question as to whether scientists should break from universities and corporate labs and fund their research and experiments without ties to those institutions, which will necessarily have some impact on the science being carried out in small and sometimes large ways. Personally, I suspect that there would be a large drop in both quality and quantity if this were to become the norm.
So you're saying that if it's 10m then it's only because ads, and if it's longer it's only because more ads. There's no valid reason for a video to be longer than 9 minutes according to you. That sounds absurd to me. You're not actually arguing a point, you're just complaining about ads.
I also despise YT ads. (Embedded ads are less annoying because they can be at least slightly relevant to the content.) How much time do you spend watching ads? How much is your time worth?
Some recommend valuing your personal time at $50/h. YouTube Premium family membership is $18 and gives 6 people ad-free viewing which comes to $3/person/month. At these rates you break even at 3.6 minutes of ads. That could be just 2 videos.
I think there are valid reasons, just that you will rarely encounter such videos, be able to identify them if you do, be able to seek them out consistently, and that those who produce them will probably not do so for very long.
A discussion between @ghaff and myself a few months ago on this aspect. I find 10--30 minutes a sweet spot as well, with an information-dense 10 minutes highly preferable.
For a deeper discussion pulling in more references and nuances, 20--60 minutes can work, but the content's got to deserve it. Excessive filler content ("Mayday: Air Disaster", The History Channel, "The Gift Shop Sketch" is of course the exemplar: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc) is absolutely maddening.
Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?
I think Veritasium makes some of the most valuable and informative videos out there. Definitely not the kind of channel that i would consider "baiting" with titles and then disappointing with the video content itself.
His views on video titles' "clickbaitiness", given the state of affairs of Youtube recommendation algorithms and the "competition" for viewers' attention, seem pretty on point to me.
He specifically said in the video that he hasn't been doing this in the past, but plans to "get better at it".
I think one of his videos that qualifies as pure clickbait is "Can a Wind-Powered Car Go Faster Than The Wind?". It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information. Certainly not 20 minutes worth, and very different from the rest of his videos. It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
> It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information.
It's entertainment, not a scientific lecture. As entertainment, it contained far more information that the vast majority of competing entertainment.
> and very different from the rest of his videos.
I must disagree here, I think most of his videos contain very little information as well. Less than I would like, in any case.
> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
How is this not a good thing? It's great for people who actually want more information, and it's great for the creators who provide said information. It makes the creator community (I hate that term) healthy.
I understood that he's been doing more clickbaity titles for the past year or two, but maybe i misunderstood.
For the first video about the wind powered vehicle, yes i agree. It was more of a story and spectacle than any actual information. Still quite entertaining i think, but maybe disappointing if you wanted to learn something, which is usually the spirit of the channel.
> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
Yes, including one by him, in which he specifically addresses the shortcoming of the video you are referencing and notes it's an example of what he considers a failure of him providing enough information in the video.
I never understood this type of reasoning, where just because the creator(s) acknowledge their shortcomings, you're not allow to not like the video because of it, or complain about it. So I'll repeat, "I didn't like the video", don't take it personally.
If it's a criticism of the video in isolation, then that holds merit. It sounded to me like it was a criticism of his technique and how he does things. That he acknowledged that as a mistake to rectify makes it less valid as a critique of that as long as he actually changes.
The person I was replying to asked for a specific example, I provided one. I still like his content, still subscribe, and have watch most of his videos since. Seems like some people are just taking this as a "hate on Vertasium" post.
A shame he doesn't name them properly to make the "most valuable and informative" videoes more easily accessible to those in need of information on the topic
I know that he makes good videos, but he seems to give a free pass to clickbait here. We know how clickbait works from SEO: thousands of articles with same clickbait titles, which ends up in content mattering less and less, creates SEO farms, leads to content makers having to buy ads to feature their
content etc. Also, even the title of this video becomes confusing: this video will now show up for someone searching for Wigner's famous speech with the same name, plus the title is factually incorrect, clickbait is reasonably effective, not unreasonably.
Veritasium is good but it's definitely on the fluffy/filler content side of things. I wouldn't exactly call it the most valuable and informative videos out there. It's more breath than depth.
Veritasium has about 2800x more subscribers than the linked channel.
I wonder if removing all the engaging "fluff" and just listing information reduces the impact of videos. Like, maybe the trade-off is between having a shorter, denser video so the few people who watch it can get their information in less time, versus having 10x more people watch and learn the information.
Probably as simple as the linked channel (Reflective Channel) has about 40 videos over the past 7 years, and Veritasium has more than I can count. So Reflective Channel has just had fewer videos to promote, and thus, a smaller audience.
> Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?
Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)
It's not just a problem that he's discussed before- it is the central motivation behind his approach of "person-on-the-street interviews".
His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.
His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.
Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.
> to accelerate the access to relevant information so that the world can move forward faster.
While I would love this to be true, we have to remember that so much of the internet is a business in our capitalist economy. To many YouTube channels (especially the big ones), the primary purpose of the title is to get someone to watch the video to make money. Sharing information is only a secondary purpose.
This is true across basically every business. The primary purpose of anything is profit, and every other thing is secondary. This is why health care is difficult to privatize, as the primary purpose of profit is very easily at odds with the secondary purpose of health outcomes.
I feel like I see this purpose thing come up all the time in different parts of businesses, and it really makes me wonder whether this system is sustainable. The YouTube channel is justified in writing a clickbait title, because other types of titles reduce profit. And because of the way our society and economy works, reducing profit is always a “bad” thing. You could say that with more profit, the creators could expand the business and provide even more value to their viewers. Maybe that’s true in this case, but that’s basically the whole reason clickbait exists. I’m not sure we should be that happy about it.
OT: Youtube should adopt Github-like URLs so you could know that this was a Veritasium video just by looking at the link. Secondly, HN should show more of the URL for such sites.
IF Youtube revealed the creator's channel on the URL THEN HN could (and should) show that element.
Note that the suggested change would also better enable my requested feature of being able to block specific channels by providing the in-URL hooks to do so.
Furthermore, it would allow me to turn off my ad-block for certain creators, without making me suffer through ads on videos made by creators I'm not willing to support in that way.
Veritasium is an awesome channel. Check his videos out if you haven't already.
Derek wrote a PHD on how to make videos interesting while learning and his YouTube reflects some deep thoughts on how to do that. Quality is awesome, he is personable, and you feel you always learn some deep insider knowledge.
some quick research says that he got a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney. You can read his PhD thesis, "Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education", right here: https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/physics/pdfs/research/supe...
I think GP meant A/B for your own thumbnails, so you'd be able to randomly show two different thumbnail/titles to viewers and then see stats for each one. They can come clarify if that's incorrect.
How can an external tool do this? As far as I know, there is no way to show half of your audience a title/thumbnail and the other half another title/thumbnail. If they are not testing different variants at the same time, it limits what can be learnt from the experiment.
TubeBuddy's A/B Testing works by having you create a variation of a video's metadata (this could include the Thumbnail, Title, Tags or Description). We then alternate your video's metadata every 24 hours at Midnight PST (to line up with YouTube Analytics statistics). The test completes either based on a certain number of days that you picked or based on statistical significance being achieved.
In an ideal world, we'd be able to have each impression throughout the day alternate between the Original and Variation which would be a 'true' A/B test. Since YouTube analytics are only provided in 24 hours blocks, our current system is basically the best that can be done taking into account YouTube's limitations.
While I like the channel in general, these attempts at justifying click bait are just annoying. Just do it if you deem it necessary, but don't pretend like you have the moral high ground for doing it. You don't.
That being said, Veritasium is among the least clickbaity clickbaiters.
Somewhat unrelated but I think there should be a law to force all of these big corps to give people an opt out button to disable algorithmic feeds and recommendations.
While Youtube doesn't have a full opt-out it does at least have a reverse chronological feed still available[0]. You can get quite close to an algorithm free experience by using that feed, combined with blocking sections that include recommendations with ublock origin.
You can block the Recommendations (and Comments) portions of the page, provided you're using a browser that supports extensions, using uBlock Origin or Stylish, amongst others.
Yes I already do that. My issue is with recommendations in app, I mostly watch CS / ML lectures and for some reason youtube keeps recommending right wingers and other sensational clickbait no matter how much I click "not interested" and "don't recommend channel".
how odd, I don't find this true for me at all. For a while I turned off watch history (which means that the recommendations are only based on your subscriptions) and that was... not an objection improvement, it made it harder to find content that was unlike the stuff I'm subscribed to, but it also made my recommendations more focused.
What's left out of most discussions of clickbait are the questions of consequence and of engineered promotionn.
Clickbait is effective where it can be employed without consequence. YouTube is one such domain.
It's inordinately effective where algorithms promote material based on short-term appeal rather than long-term benefit.
Where either or both of these factors are addressed, clickbait doesn't disappear entirely (it does hook into human psychology), but its effectiveness and power fall markedly.
YouTube does not support blocking of individual channels by users, or at least didn't as of the last time I used it whilst logged in (some years ago). If I'm presented with content that is absolute bilgewater, I cannot in any way indicate to the system "do not show me content from this source at all ever". This is the equivalent of a privately-functioning super-downvote, and is an exceedingly strong signal YouTUbe are denying themselves over content quality. Its availability would be among the very few possible reasons I'd consider accessing the service other than anonymously (and preferably through a front-end such as Invidious or FixYT, or commandline / terminal tools such as youtube-dl, mpv, or mps-youtube). Eventually, YouTube might themselves consider re-jiggering their recommendations away from channels which are consistently blocked.
In the absence, attention and misdirection games can be played, repeatedly, without risk.
(Oh: and quality contributors such as Derek Muller are also harmed by this as they're competing with scum-sucking bottom feeders for their own far superior productions.)
The other aspect is that the algorithm itself promotes short-term engagement at the cost of not only long-term value and quality, but genuine social harm, as has been well documented over recent years. (Including by Destin Sandler in an excellent 3-part series on online disinformation, the YouTube segment is here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4) This means that the existing psychological highjacking is further juiced algorithmically.
I've just had an exchange with dang about a recent submission and site which makes no bones about its dedication to pseudoscience and disinformation. Hacker News does have a policy of penalising (though not completely blocking) such sites. In our back-and-forth, dang offered (tongue-in-cheek, I'm pretty sure), that any strict "no bullshit" rule would render much of the present-day Internet inadmissable on HN. The longer I think that over, the more my response is "Yes, and that would be a Good Thing."
(I'm well aware if issues with truth-determination, epistemology, simple errors, politically-motivated censorship, and more. I'm referring here to publishers and authors who specifically and categorically defend posting of bullshit, though that's not the full extent of what I'd object to. I refer to Dante's Inferno in which it is the 8th of the 9 circles to which false counselors, falsifiers, hypocrits, schismatics, corrupt politicians, flatterers, pimps, and seducers are consigned. Violations of trust strike at t...
> It's inordinately effective where algorithms promote material based on short-term appeal rather than long-term benefit.
Could propose a way to measure long-term benefit?
If you have an proposal for a metric, can it be used to make decisions which video to show now, without needing to access to information from the future?
Is current usage an indication of attraction (appeal) or of frustration (lack of a viable alternative)?
That said, the problematique of distinguishing short-term and long-term benefits (or harms) is a difficult one. It's inherently one that markets fail at fairly spectacularly, though so do numerous other systems.
I'd ... expect ... that there's some prior literature on this in the media space. It's also in large part the domain of aesthetics in philosophy.
There are a few institutions which have managed to retain a high quality standard over time. At the scale of the Internet, I'd nominate HN, and largely credit its moderation for that. Having principles, values, and an enforcement mechanism for those helps.
At a larger and longer-term scale, universities are among the very longest-lived and highly-durable human and social institutions. I'm not sure of all the reasons for this, and it's possible that in some cases this is a historical accident. It's also true that there have historicially been tremendous barriers to entry. Oxford and Cambridge in England / the UK had a chartered monopoly on all higher education until the 19th century. Even after the removal of that protection, they've remained highly durable as elite institutions.
>YouTube does not support blocking of individual channels by users, or at least didn't as of the last time I used it whilst logged in (some years ago).
They do have this now and I've blocked dozens of channels. It's the only thing that makes YT watchable. I do wish I could see the list of blocked channels though. Promotion for niche content on other channels is also not great.
His justifications bother me, it's still making money from manipulation, and in at least one example he makes, fear.
One thing that doesn't get mention is how clickbait changes your audience, usually in a race to the bottom. It alienates fewer people than it attracts, but then your new audience reacts differently to your content.
The challenge, as he mentions a bit at the end, is that "no manipulation" isn't an option. He didn't have to climb up on a ladder, or post-edit 3D labels on top of his presentation, or make a cute little animation of a present unwrapping into another present. He did all of that to make the video more engaging, which means nothing more or less than manipulating people to keep watching. Crazy titles bug me personally a lot more than fancy editing or weird props, but as long as they're not so misleading I can't make an informed decision on what to watch, it's hard to begrudge content creators an engagement tool that can make such a difference.
What is and is not "manipulation" depends on your definition of manipulation. A very narrow definition captures only intentional harm and a very broad definition excludes only existing in a vacuum isolated from the universe.
It is pretty easy, when you are engaging in questionable manipulation to justify what you are doing by picking a somewhat broader line for what counts as manipulation compared to what you are doing and then saying "see! there's no way I can't manipulate!". Comforting perhaps but more of a rationalization than a reason.
When you make your decisions about quality with popularity as a basis, there is no way you don't end up being manipulative with or without intent. This is what is wrong with the attention economy, it evolves the world to find and exploit the weaknesses in humans.
>so misleading I can't make an informed decision on what to watch
I'm finding this to be more and more the case. It seems like a competition on who can withhold the most information about what the video is actually about. Soon enough all youtube videos will be titled "???" and the thumbnails will just be random static
I took the video as a long winded “don’t hate the player hate the game” and assume he wants external validation that it’s okay to manipulate people if everyone else is doing it.
I like him and watch all his videos, but the ease of that justification is why we are on a long slippery slide straight into dystopia.
On the other hand, judging people for actions/justifications like these makes it easier to postpone or avoid making demands for systematic changes. Blaming individuals is easier, and has a higher chance of getting results. The fossil fuel industry is great at utilizing this, placing blame on individuals of the general public for pollution.
If you're a race car driver who takes sponsorships from Ford to promote car culture and sell more gas guzzlers to the general public, shouldn't your chosen role in this system that earn you some ire? That's just "the player playing the game", except the game is a big problem. And if the game is a problem, then so are the players who choose to play it.
Maybe that race car driver is a brainlet who would otherwise be living in poverty, so we shouldn't give him too much grief for it. Probably not, but maybe. But the veritasium guy? He's surely a bright guy with plenty of opportunities; he could have chosen another line of work.
I think your points are valid, and it's an interesting problem, but I think a few key differences are worth noting.
A race driver is a much more elite position. There are less of them than there are Youtubers, and there's a lot more attention on you. A dismissal of a sponsorship could be spun into a big PR move, if they wanted to. Compare that to a single social media actor, you'd have to be an absolute huge name to make any sort of difference, simply because there are so many others out there that will immediately fill the gap you'd leave.
Maybe Derek (I had to google his name) would be able to choose another line of work, but what if your passion is to spread knowledge about science and such to the general public? As much as I dislike them myself, I really do believe that social media such as Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, is the best way to achieve that goal today.
I hear that, but it seems like in the video he doesn’t place any blame on the platforms, and treats it as a kind of natural phenomenon (I stopped watching after he compared it to evolution).
I don’t think anything he said is incorrect, but he does seem to miss the world of possible incentive structures that would reduce clickbait.
What do you expect people to do? Let their YouTube careers bleed to death because of their principle? The only one at fault here is YouTube and their algorithm.
That’s the issue I’m highlighting. The dystopian evolution consists of all these small steps where people shrug and say “everyone else is doing it” and it ratchets up another notch.
The only way to stop it is to stop giving an inch. But that will never happen, guys like him have way too much to lose to take a stand. Plus most of the other YouTubers will happily continue so it will have been for nothing.
Any title will change the state of the reader's mind. The question is what is the split of benefits or harms between the reader and the writer. This goes beyond Youtube, and even interactions motivated by money.
This is an area where I was initially very bothered, but over time have arrived at the opinion that it is very nuanced, and that things like this can be incredibly positive.
If I go to the grocery store, they have a display of fruit, and I decide to buy a few, I have been manipulated. They were motivated by profit (sell more fruit). This required consuming some of my attention (I had intended to go to the store and buy different items). However, both I (yummy healthy fruit) and the grocery store (money to owners, employees, suppliers) benefit from this interaction.
There are other types of interactions where one or more parties are negatively affected in the sum of the overall interaction. This are obviously bad, but are besides the point.
If someone has a product with the highest value for the opportunity cost, I want to be manipulated into using it. However I also want to avoid manipulation where I gain little, zero, or negative benefit. It's a complicated problem, and I have found that the maximum benefit to me (and everyone involved) sits squarely (and very annoyingly) in the grey area.
As for Veritasium, I have watched his videos for roughly a decade. Any video of his in my subscription feed is going to be watched. Any increase in viewership which allows him to increase his budget and quality only benefits me, provided he's behaving ethically. I see from this video that he's examining the problem and at least trying to be ethical, which I appreciate.
Well, one YouTuber I follow, don't remember which, was quite irate and disappointed regarding his coverage of a recent self-driving cars video (IIRC), that amounted to ~"barely a bit more than an ad". (Haven't watched the Veritasium's video in question yet, so cannot really comment on the veracity of the claims.)
Well, 3% into the video he mentions it's a sponsored video, so I'm not sure that saying it's too ad like is valid criticism. Perhaps him using his platform for ads is a valid criticism, but nearly every Youtuber makes their living at least in part doing sponsor videos/segments, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the video. However I'm bullish on Waymo's approach to self driving, so I wouldn't feel it as much if the video is too positive.
And here Veritasium already practiced an idea in this video! When I watched this a few days ago it was still called “We Need To Talk About Clickbait.”
I guess that didn’t convert enough, so they tweaked the name to “Clickbait Is Unreasonably Effective,” but kept the thumbnail the same (for now).
The Veritasium channel does this with all its videos; it lets Derek test which thumbnail/titles are effective and which aren't. He talks about it in this videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8
at about the 15:50-16:00 mark
Veritasium also tested different versions of the thumbnail. Here's a snapshot of when the thumbnail said "It's important; I'll explain with data:" https://i.stack.imgur.com/XuUES.png
I saw the video shortly after it was released, and I thought it was ironic the video had a relatively weak thumbnail and title.
> Veritasium also tested different versions of the thumbnail
Pretty sure there automated tools that A/B test thumbs and titles and most big youtubers use them and then just add a bunch of titles and thumbs that are automatically tested.
There was a section near the end of video where the background flashed dozens of images in rapid succession. I’m not familiar with the process of setting thumbnails in YT videos - do you have to choose a frame from the actual video, and is this a trick to provide many potential thumbnails to choose from?
Click bait is why I click on any title. I, like many others here spend 12-18hours a day on the internet for work and otherwise, can almost sense a BS title from experience.
Many content creators on YouTube succumb to creating a clickbait title because their video stats reveal which of their videos are popular. Naturally, this encourages the creator to make more videos on that theme or topic.
But how many videos on the same topic (in the same channel) can you regurgitate over and over? To give an example, how many videos on the topic of 'productivity' can you cram into the same channel? As many as possible it seems given the high subscriber counts for some channels that talk mostly about 'productivity'.
The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that the high subscriber counts for those channels prove clickbait titles work (as discussed in the video). The distinction between Type I and II clickbait titles in the video is useful though.
For programming channels, the clickbait tendency seems lower than other types of channels (based purely on anecdotal impressions). There is plenty of clickbait in the wider computing/technology channel space on YouTube.
This YouTube video is an honest look at creating content for YouTube from one Software Engineer (watch at 2x if the video is too long):
My grandfather, who I respected very much, was an accomplished career bureaucrat and considered any sort of promotion beneath him, and for sure crafting clickbait would earn his scorn. Thus marketing, promotion and crafting clickbait goes against everything I come from.
But, making something that I think will actually help people, and then watching it go unseen because I wouldn't do the thing required to spread the message via the network effect is a far worse fate.
I mentally banish hipster clickbait titles as soon as I see them. Things like "unreasonably effective" and "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love X" are toxic to me, so I almost never bother reading whatever they link to.
But clickbait is something I'm interested in, so I went ahead and watched the video. Or at least I listened to it -- 98% of the video was a guy inexplicably standing on a ladder, waving his hands around, while casting a shadow against a screen.
The video is a justification of why it's okay for him to use clickbait. The same justifications are used by spammers and criminals to justify their actions. Nobody thinks it's fascism when they do it. It's some pretty light-weight wrongdoing he's into though, and I'm fairly sympathetic to the argument.
The reality is that you can't get a good social network without a lot of idiots. If you want to reach the widest cross-section of people they are going to be Dan Carlin levels of "average".
But as the top comment here shows, there's an insidious and perverse effect of scraping the bottom of the barrel. You might just start to like it. This person would be wise to be wary of such.
I really appreciate his current title of that example video "The Simplest Math Problem No One Can Solve - The Collatz Conjecture" because the thing that pisses me off most about clickbait is that I just don't know what the video or article is even about. It just creates an immediate dilemma which I personally find stressful. I think it actually violates the principle of autonomy because they're intentionally taking away your ability to make an informed decision. People mention deception but it's a little bit more than that because of this.
Maybe that's me, but I think the worst offenders are the ones who actually disappoint (Veritasium not being one.) How can we disincentivize them doing that? Currently, there seems to be little downside for them completely misrepresenting their content.
At least in that particular case the image (if not the title) gave you, personally, the information you needed about the video topic. If you know what the Collatz Conjecture is, the image “3x+1” makes the topic obvious. If you don’t, your curiosity is piqued.
> "Now there seems to be a paradox when it comes to clickbait. People almost universally claim to hate it, but you also see it everywhere."
His paradox of clickbait is very... interesting. I propose a similar paradox of used car salesmen: People say they hate it when used car salesmen lie to them, yet used car salesmen who lie the most sell the most cars!
I think the more people we educate on critical thinking, the less effective click bait will be.
Today though, if a used car salesman has some truly great cars that people really need but nobody buys them because Donald down the street is pulling people in to buy lemons with bald faced lies...well, that's sort of the conundrum we find ourselves in, isn't it?
The core issue isn't education, but that as a user you have little to no control over the recommendation system and the rest of the Youtube experience. So even if you hate clickbait and want to get rid of it, there is nothing that you can do to make it disappear from your Youtube. Google fully controls what you get to see and they don't care if you feel happy or educated from watching videos, they only care that you keep watching so that they can show you ads.
To have any hope of fixing this we'd need to separate the curation of content from the hosting of content.
110 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadTough to put in words really. Maybe it could be rephrased to "I found that he is trying to legitimize clickbait", however the second part of the sentence says that too.
That's rather unclear and nonstandard, in my view.
- pre-roll ads
- embedded sponsored content
- plug for your patreon/other videos
- reminder to like/subscribe/comment
- a tiny nugget of actual content SOMETIMES
- mid-roll ads
- post-roll ads
I agree that 10 minutes feels about right if you were actually trying to convey a good chunk of information in good faith, but that's just not what happens on youtube. Maybe 10 minutes was a good threshold for midroll ads for the same reason that it would have been a good threshold for quality videos.
Videos like the linked one, while technically longer, just result in more and more mid-roll ads. In fact while attempting to watch this one, I got just past his embedded sponsorship plug, when youtube ambushed me with the "Ads in 3... 2... 1..." type of ad that makes it impossible to tell just how much of the video is compromised by ads before watching it.
And it's where I've ended up with my podcasts. Less than 12 or so feels like you're barely getting started and get past about 30 and, as a listener, I'm generally losing interest. It's no coincidence that longer professionally produced podcasts almost always have segments or otherwise break up the content.
Part of that is making sure he can afford to do so, so we should consider holistically whether breaking from the ad roll time format is better in the end or not. if he can keep up the quantity and quality of videos, then maybe it's worth breaking with that format. If he can't, then maybe it's not.
The is a similar question as to whether scientists should break from universities and corporate labs and fund their research and experiments without ties to those institutions, which will necessarily have some impact on the science being carried out in small and sometimes large ways. Personally, I suspect that there would be a large drop in both quality and quantity if this were to become the norm.
I also despise YT ads. (Embedded ads are less annoying because they can be at least slightly relevant to the content.) How much time do you spend watching ads? How much is your time worth?
Some recommend valuing your personal time at $50/h. YouTube Premium family membership is $18 and gives 6 people ad-free viewing which comes to $3/person/month. At these rates you break even at 3.6 minutes of ads. That could be just 2 videos.
Six people who live in the same household, to be clear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27337668
For a deeper discussion pulling in more references and nuances, 20--60 minutes can work, but the content's got to deserve it. Excessive filler content ("Mayday: Air Disaster", The History Channel, "The Gift Shop Sketch" is of course the exemplar: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc) is absolutely maddening.
I think Veritasium makes some of the most valuable and informative videos out there. Definitely not the kind of channel that i would consider "baiting" with titles and then disappointing with the video content itself.
His views on video titles' "clickbaitiness", given the state of affairs of Youtube recommendation algorithms and the "competition" for viewers' attention, seem pretty on point to me.
I think one of his videos that qualifies as pure clickbait is "Can a Wind-Powered Car Go Faster Than The Wind?". It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information. Certainly not 20 minutes worth, and very different from the rest of his videos. It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
It's entertainment, not a scientific lecture. As entertainment, it contained far more information that the vast majority of competing entertainment.
> and very different from the rest of his videos.
I must disagree here, I think most of his videos contain very little information as well. Less than I would like, in any case.
> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.
How is this not a good thing? It's great for people who actually want more information, and it's great for the creators who provide said information. It makes the creator community (I hate that term) healthy.
For the first video about the wind powered vehicle, yes i agree. It was more of a story and spectacle than any actual information. Still quite entertaining i think, but maybe disappointing if you wanted to learn something, which is usually the spirit of the channel.
Yes, including one by him, in which he specifically addresses the shortcoming of the video you are referencing and notes it's an example of what he considers a failure of him providing enough information in the video.
Here's an example of someone low-key having really valuable and informative content, with very little fluff: https://youtube.com/channel/UCGKe6VmbFOX-3C30JjEsV-g
I wonder if removing all the engaging "fluff" and just listing information reduces the impact of videos. Like, maybe the trade-off is between having a shorter, denser video so the few people who watch it can get their information in less time, versus having 10x more people watch and learn the information.
Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)
His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.
His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.
Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.
While I would love this to be true, we have to remember that so much of the internet is a business in our capitalist economy. To many YouTube channels (especially the big ones), the primary purpose of the title is to get someone to watch the video to make money. Sharing information is only a secondary purpose.
This is true across basically every business. The primary purpose of anything is profit, and every other thing is secondary. This is why health care is difficult to privatize, as the primary purpose of profit is very easily at odds with the secondary purpose of health outcomes.
I feel like I see this purpose thing come up all the time in different parts of businesses, and it really makes me wonder whether this system is sustainable. The YouTube channel is justified in writing a clickbait title, because other types of titles reduce profit. And because of the way our society and economy works, reducing profit is always a “bad” thing. You could say that with more profit, the creators could expand the business and provide even more value to their viewers. Maybe that’s true in this case, but that’s basically the whole reason clickbait exists. I’m not sure we should be that happy about it.
I am not familiar with this phrase - is it a typo or is this just a bit of slang I have missed out on - is it a variant of this https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cope
For example:
Alice: I may be ugly, but at least I’m not superficial.
Bob: Cope
Note that the suggested change would also better enable my requested feature of being able to block specific channels by providing the in-URL hooks to do so.
(Not OP.)
Derek wrote a PHD on how to make videos interesting while learning and his YouTube reflects some deep thoughts on how to do that. Quality is awesome, he is personable, and you feel you always learn some deep insider knowledge.
In an ideal world, we'd be able to have each impression throughout the day alternate between the Original and Variation which would be a 'true' A/B test. Since YouTube analytics are only provided in 24 hours blocks, our current system is basically the best that can be done taking into account YouTube's limitations.
https://tubebuddy.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5...
That being said, Veritasium is among the least clickbaity clickbaiters.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266550
Or do you want just a list of videos from channels you've subscribed to?
Clickbait is effective where it can be employed without consequence. YouTube is one such domain.
It's inordinately effective where algorithms promote material based on short-term appeal rather than long-term benefit.
Where either or both of these factors are addressed, clickbait doesn't disappear entirely (it does hook into human psychology), but its effectiveness and power fall markedly.
YouTube does not support blocking of individual channels by users, or at least didn't as of the last time I used it whilst logged in (some years ago). If I'm presented with content that is absolute bilgewater, I cannot in any way indicate to the system "do not show me content from this source at all ever". This is the equivalent of a privately-functioning super-downvote, and is an exceedingly strong signal YouTUbe are denying themselves over content quality. Its availability would be among the very few possible reasons I'd consider accessing the service other than anonymously (and preferably through a front-end such as Invidious or FixYT, or commandline / terminal tools such as youtube-dl, mpv, or mps-youtube). Eventually, YouTube might themselves consider re-jiggering their recommendations away from channels which are consistently blocked.
In the absence, attention and misdirection games can be played, repeatedly, without risk.
(Oh: and quality contributors such as Derek Muller are also harmed by this as they're competing with scum-sucking bottom feeders for their own far superior productions.)
The other aspect is that the algorithm itself promotes short-term engagement at the cost of not only long-term value and quality, but genuine social harm, as has been well documented over recent years. (Including by Destin Sandler in an excellent 3-part series on online disinformation, the YouTube segment is here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4) This means that the existing psychological highjacking is further juiced algorithmically.
On desktop systems where the option is available to me, I use CSS hacks to remove both recommendations and comments from YouTube. The experience improves tremendously. (Stylish: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom-the... though the uBlock Origin elements remover can also be used for this.)
I've just had an exchange with dang about a recent submission and site which makes no bones about its dedication to pseudoscience and disinformation. Hacker News does have a policy of penalising (though not completely blocking) such sites. In our back-and-forth, dang offered (tongue-in-cheek, I'm pretty sure), that any strict "no bullshit" rule would render much of the present-day Internet inadmissable on HN. The longer I think that over, the more my response is "Yes, and that would be a Good Thing."
(I'm well aware if issues with truth-determination, epistemology, simple errors, politically-motivated censorship, and more. I'm referring here to publishers and authors who specifically and categorically defend posting of bullshit, though that's not the full extent of what I'd object to. I refer to Dante's Inferno in which it is the 8th of the 9 circles to which false counselors, falsifiers, hypocrits, schismatics, corrupt politicians, flatterers, pimps, and seducers are consigned. Violations of trust strike at t...
Could propose a way to measure long-term benefit?
If you have an proposal for a metric, can it be used to make decisions which video to show now, without needing to access to information from the future?
Is current usage an indication of attraction (appeal) or of frustration (lack of a viable alternative)?
That said, the problematique of distinguishing short-term and long-term benefits (or harms) is a difficult one. It's inherently one that markets fail at fairly spectacularly, though so do numerous other systems.
I'd ... expect ... that there's some prior literature on this in the media space. It's also in large part the domain of aesthetics in philosophy.
There are a few institutions which have managed to retain a high quality standard over time. At the scale of the Internet, I'd nominate HN, and largely credit its moderation for that. Having principles, values, and an enforcement mechanism for those helps.
At a larger and longer-term scale, universities are among the very longest-lived and highly-durable human and social institutions. I'm not sure of all the reasons for this, and it's possible that in some cases this is a historical accident. It's also true that there have historicially been tremendous barriers to entry. Oxford and Cambridge in England / the UK had a chartered monopoly on all higher education until the 19th century. Even after the removal of that protection, they've remained highly durable as elite institutions.
They do have this now and I've blocked dozens of channels. It's the only thing that makes YT watchable. I do wish I could see the list of blocked channels though. Promotion for niche content on other channels is also not great.
After getting really annoyed with some unpleasant thumbnails that just kept showing up, I came up with the following ublock origin rule:
to exclude things from the recommendations lists. Not sure how well it'll scale if I had a large number to exclude though.One thing that doesn't get mention is how clickbait changes your audience, usually in a race to the bottom. It alienates fewer people than it attracts, but then your new audience reacts differently to your content.
It is pretty easy, when you are engaging in questionable manipulation to justify what you are doing by picking a somewhat broader line for what counts as manipulation compared to what you are doing and then saying "see! there's no way I can't manipulate!". Comforting perhaps but more of a rationalization than a reason.
When you make your decisions about quality with popularity as a basis, there is no way you don't end up being manipulative with or without intent. This is what is wrong with the attention economy, it evolves the world to find and exploit the weaknesses in humans.
I'm finding this to be more and more the case. It seems like a competition on who can withhold the most information about what the video is actually about. Soon enough all youtube videos will be titled "???" and the thumbnails will just be random static
I like him and watch all his videos, but the ease of that justification is why we are on a long slippery slide straight into dystopia.
Maybe that race car driver is a brainlet who would otherwise be living in poverty, so we shouldn't give him too much grief for it. Probably not, but maybe. But the veritasium guy? He's surely a bright guy with plenty of opportunities; he could have chosen another line of work.
A race driver is a much more elite position. There are less of them than there are Youtubers, and there's a lot more attention on you. A dismissal of a sponsorship could be spun into a big PR move, if they wanted to. Compare that to a single social media actor, you'd have to be an absolute huge name to make any sort of difference, simply because there are so many others out there that will immediately fill the gap you'd leave.
Maybe Derek (I had to google his name) would be able to choose another line of work, but what if your passion is to spread knowledge about science and such to the general public? As much as I dislike them myself, I really do believe that social media such as Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, is the best way to achieve that goal today.
I don’t think anything he said is incorrect, but he does seem to miss the world of possible incentive structures that would reduce clickbait.
The only way to stop it is to stop giving an inch. But that will never happen, guys like him have way too much to lose to take a stand. Plus most of the other YouTubers will happily continue so it will have been for nothing.
It's completely unrealistic to expect an individual to do the "right" thing here. When that right thing means their career ends.
This is an area where I was initially very bothered, but over time have arrived at the opinion that it is very nuanced, and that things like this can be incredibly positive.
If I go to the grocery store, they have a display of fruit, and I decide to buy a few, I have been manipulated. They were motivated by profit (sell more fruit). This required consuming some of my attention (I had intended to go to the store and buy different items). However, both I (yummy healthy fruit) and the grocery store (money to owners, employees, suppliers) benefit from this interaction.
There are other types of interactions where one or more parties are negatively affected in the sum of the overall interaction. This are obviously bad, but are besides the point.
If someone has a product with the highest value for the opportunity cost, I want to be manipulated into using it. However I also want to avoid manipulation where I gain little, zero, or negative benefit. It's a complicated problem, and I have found that the maximum benefit to me (and everyone involved) sits squarely (and very annoyingly) in the grey area.
As for Veritasium, I have watched his videos for roughly a decade. Any video of his in my subscription feed is going to be watched. Any increase in viewership which allows him to increase his budget and quality only benefits me, provided he's behaving ethically. I see from this video that he's examining the problem and at least trying to be ethical, which I appreciate.
Well, one YouTuber I follow, don't remember which, was quite irate and disappointed regarding his coverage of a recent self-driving cars video (IIRC), that amounted to ~"barely a bit more than an ad". (Haven't watched the Veritasium's video in question yet, so cannot really comment on the veracity of the claims.)
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the video. However I'm bullish on Waymo's approach to self driving, so I wouldn't feel it as much if the video is too positive.
I saw the video shortly after it was released, and I thought it was ironic the video had a relatively weak thumbnail and title.
Pretty sure there automated tools that A/B test thumbs and titles and most big youtubers use them and then just add a bunch of titles and thumbs that are automatically tested.
But how many videos on the same topic (in the same channel) can you regurgitate over and over? To give an example, how many videos on the topic of 'productivity' can you cram into the same channel? As many as possible it seems given the high subscriber counts for some channels that talk mostly about 'productivity'.
The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that the high subscriber counts for those channels prove clickbait titles work (as discussed in the video). The distinction between Type I and II clickbait titles in the video is useful though.
For programming channels, the clickbait tendency seems lower than other types of channels (based purely on anecdotal impressions). There is plenty of clickbait in the wider computing/technology channel space on YouTube.
This YouTube video is an honest look at creating content for YouTube from one Software Engineer (watch at 2x if the video is too long):
I almost burnt out creating software engineering content on YouTube, here is what I learned : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAJJORDSlho
But, making something that I think will actually help people, and then watching it go unseen because I wouldn't do the thing required to spread the message via the network effect is a far worse fate.
So, I do the thing.
But clickbait is something I'm interested in, so I went ahead and watched the video. Or at least I listened to it -- 98% of the video was a guy inexplicably standing on a ladder, waving his hands around, while casting a shadow against a screen.
The video is a justification of why it's okay for him to use clickbait. The same justifications are used by spammers and criminals to justify their actions. Nobody thinks it's fascism when they do it. It's some pretty light-weight wrongdoing he's into though, and I'm fairly sympathetic to the argument.
The reality is that you can't get a good social network without a lot of idiots. If you want to reach the widest cross-section of people they are going to be Dan Carlin levels of "average".
But as the top comment here shows, there's an insidious and perverse effect of scraping the bottom of the barrel. You might just start to like it. This person would be wise to be wary of such.
Maybe that's me, but I think the worst offenders are the ones who actually disappoint (Veritasium not being one.) How can we disincentivize them doing that? Currently, there seems to be little downside for them completely misrepresenting their content.
His paradox of clickbait is very... interesting. I propose a similar paradox of used car salesmen: People say they hate it when used car salesmen lie to them, yet used car salesmen who lie the most sell the most cars!
Today though, if a used car salesman has some truly great cars that people really need but nobody buys them because Donald down the street is pulling people in to buy lemons with bald faced lies...well, that's sort of the conundrum we find ourselves in, isn't it?
To have any hope of fixing this we'd need to separate the curation of content from the hosting of content.
Daniel Pink describes this in detail in to "Sell is Human" Here's a short summary. https://fourminutebooks.com/to-sell-is-human-summary/