- should be obvious they pad their vids for runtime (unsuccessfully boring)
- they need to cool it with the titles; we live in a post clickbait world
theres a chrome/firefox extension that fixes youtube clickbait titles and thumbnails called DeArrow, by the same dev as Sponsorblock, which unpads the vids.
DeArrow has improved my YouTube experience. I still switch it off for some channels I like (such as SiIvaGunner, for reasons that are obvious if you watch them.) It’s best when it has crowdsourced titles, which have actually made some videos more intriguing.
I saw a video thumbnail the other day that would normally be titled “Why Minecraft players built a real life supercomputer”, which is way too vague for me to be interested, but the crowdsourced title was “Minecrafters created a distributed computation network to find the tallest cactus,” and that made me very curious. I still didn’t click it because it was a 23 minute video, though.
I’m also very grateful I don’t have to see a lot of clickbait thumbnails. Some of them actively deter me from videos that might otherwise be interesting.