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 channel 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.
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?!
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.
