Can't agree more. Any headline which invokes a "what, really?" response should not be clicked, instead the keywords (like $villain or $unflattering_third_person or $unique_despicable_action) should be searched (for pro's, in a private window via DuckDuckGo or if that sucks (like, most of the time)) with google (may involve skipping the first, second or even third page of results for _hot_ clickbait topics).

With some luck there'll be a really credible secondary, or even better, the primary source. Those usually come without clickbait headlines.

This is much better that an ad-blocker, since it doesn't increase click count for the attention-seeking clickbait news provider, and yields no money for them. In the long run, this drains their money stream. At least I hope so.

It is also simple enough to understand and follow to pass over to most non-IT-friends and acquaintances.

That might be a good strategy for dealing with youtube videos but it's not an equally good strategy for dealing with print media. The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be. A great article by a great author will quite often get a ridiculous headline from an editor, for all the bad reasons an editor might have: baiting the audience, putting their own spin on the story, or whatever.

You'll miss some things if you just skip a story because of a bad headline, and I think the cited article is just another indicator that we ought to deliberately not give headlines too much thought.

> The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be.

That shouldn’t really change your policy. Some of those YouTubers might not have a choice in their thumbnails either. This doesn’t change the fact that the person or group is attempting to get you to consume some content by using irrelevant emotional manipulation. It sucks that some people in the group are probably well-meaning and competent.

The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well. Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom - for a brief moment in history, there was a nice thought that the subscription revenue model would allow more fair and balanced reporting compared to the ad-revenue models (since they wouldn't need clickbait headlines/stories).

Turns out that people don't want to pay to hear things they don't like. So it's all become more polarized, and those of us who really would like to know what is going on have no clue what is true or not any longer.

Break the legacy institutions by boycotting them, and encourage individual journalists to self-publish. The credibility of the person will reign, and there is a huge market for independents who are actually interested in what is happening around the world without all the partisan spin.

You’ll have to put some effort into evaluating the media you use, whether or not you believe freelancers are better equipped to be effective.

> those of us who really would like to know what is going on have no clue what is true or not any longer.

Well yeah, if this is your policy:

> The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well

You’re not going to have any idea what is going on.

A vigorous application of this rejection of legacy media is going to have you completely ignoring sources that are pretty easy to parse, like AP or Reuters newsfeeds. It’s worthwhile to develop the skills needed to use those sorts of things and understand their limits, rather than ignoring them completely. You can get value from media without being completely credulous about what any one source is reporting.

Respectfully disagree - you don't "put effort into evaluating" food from a restaurant that has continually served you dodgy food. You either go elsewhere that doesn't serve you poisoned items (alternatives), or boycott eating out all together if such alternatives don't exist.

The belief is that the general media teaches you useful information from current events that impact your life. It doesn't. I'd rather read a "year in review", or something on a longer time frame, than follow things too closely.

For specialised knowledge, there are professional journals for that sort of thing. But mass media "news" is not useful at all, so I've taken the policy of cutting it out. Mental health and general life perspectives have been vastly improved.

> Respectfully disagree - you don't "put effort into evaluating" food from a restaurant that has continually served you dodgy food.

I think this is perhaps a poor analogy, but is illustrative of the real disagreement. There’s no informational equivalent to a restaurant that is so trustworthy that you no longer need give a moment’s thought to the safety of the food prepared there. That’s not to say there aren’t great newspapers or magazines or individual writers, but if you think you’ve found one whose entire output should be trusted unconditionally, I’d really want to discuss some of their lesser works with you as counterexamples.

> I'd rather read a "year in review", or something on a longer time frame, than follow things too closely.

This seems like a mentally healthy way to learn about world events, and I don’t disapprove. What you read will be produced by the same journalists, though, right?

I avoid television news almost entirely when I can and I suspect our point of view on this might not be very far apart. I do think the ability to parse corrupt - or hopefully, merely imperfect - media is an important skill for people to have.

> Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom

Sure, but the new crop of media that we've seen arise in the past couple of years isn't objectively better - it's just wretched in different ways.

How is journalism such a sad joke that things like that are "normal"?

Each publication has always had a lowest common denominator target. The headlines are an indication of the audience. In latter days, all journalists expect their audience to be stupid.

Once you read a headline it's you've already engaged with it. Maybe we could address the problem of why some media outlets keep polluting the semantic space instead of just telling consumers to change their behavior as they trudge through an ever-rising tide of information sludge.

I use the same rubric but go one step further and tell YouTube not to recommend any videos from that channel.

Is that possible? There's a channel i just don't want to see. Ever. I've blocked the channel but it regularly shows up in recommendations.

I actually have a todo item to see if i can't force the issue with a uBlock Origin rule.

When you click the three dots, it's the second option from the bottom.[1] It's not perfect, but I feel that eliminating entire channels at a time from my recommendations is a proportionate response to the engagement-maximization algorithm.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/JfYYTSk.png

Have attempted to do this with recommendations for 30-120s clips with 500,000 to 2,000,000 views from old TV shows, cartoons, and movies. It's not working.

I'd rather read a spreadsheet with a list of public YouTube video IDs/metadata than experience the silence in the downtime between worthwhile videos.

I love this extension for making YouTube less horrible. It removes the thumbnails and returns to 'frame from the video'.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

That's lovely, Thank you for the link.

Thank you

I had to stop watching Scotty Kilmer because of his thumbnails/titles. At one point it felt like every new video was click baited with him being sent to prison, dying, retiring or being forced to shut down to business.

I'm willing to tolerate the o-face from channels who put out good content on a regular basis tho.

Yes, I did the same thing about a year ago. I enjoyed his insight as a mechanic, but could not stay for the unsavory click bait. Unfortunately the technique seem to be effective and might be the only method for some of these channels to grow after a certain threshold.

But if just reading the headline is already having an emotional impact, as the source claims, then even that method won't change much as you will still be exposed to the title.

Which presents kind of an difficult problem: You won't know if an headline is emotional without actually reading it, but once you read it, and it turns out to be emotional, you will already be affected.

Developing the faculty to emotionally detach from things you read or see, and stay level-headed, is useful across one's entire life. Doctors, first responders, and other people who face extreme situations develop it to be able to do their jobs.

But it's not out of reach for a person who just practices it consciously. This is not about removing your emotions, it's about letting your mind observe the flow of emotions, and still stay and act sober.

As somebody working in palliative care I'm well aware about facing emotionally extreme situations, it's something HCWs, first responders and other social job fields, have been struggling with for as long as these occupations have existed.

That's also exactly why these sectors suffer from way above average depression rates, even tho most of them have the training, knowledge and, ideally, access facilities that should help them deal with it better.

But it's not simple as you make it out to be: Humans are emotional beings, whether we like that or not, it's not something we can "train away" or just turn off on demand, it's part of what makes us humans.

What training helps with is staying clear and sober in the moment where it counts, but that does not negate the long-term impact of regularly being exposed to such situations and the emotional toll they excerpt; It adds up, and creeps back up in the most irrelevant contexts.

To bring it back to the topic: When participants rationally knew the source and thus most likely the claim to not to be credible, even with that rational knowledge, the headline still ended up having an emotional impact on them.

Which will very likely add up over time just as it does with social jobs, but trying to evade that impact seems impossible: There is no way to know if a headline is emotional until actually reading and parsing it, but by that point it's apparently already too late.

But you've already read it, even if you don't click, so hasn't it already affected you?

Any strategy that requires a mental effort from people is likely not going to work at scale.

Is there a youtube client (or browser extension) that accepts a whitelist of channels and only shows videos from those?

This got me thinking... A browser extension deleting everything from the front page except videos from the given channels might not even be that complicated. Hm, I might end up creating a simple extension like this...

Edit: Sorry for being OT

NewPipe can do this on Android. Search for your channels, click the subscribe button, then on the home screen of the app there's a tab with the chronological list of videos from your subscriptions. You can hide the YouTube trending tab from the home screen, and within videos you can swipe between comments & suggested/related videos, so you don't lose discovery of new content.

I think this is what we need: plugins that protect users. Allow users to vote against webpages that are too “sensational” or something.

You can't crowdsource good taste. All you'll end up with is popular content gets upvoted and unpopular content doesn't. Every voting system open to the masses ends up this way. So many problems on the Internet stem from people confusing popularity with quality.

What about wikipedia?

Australia news sites favorite words: "terrifying", "chilling", "tragic", "sinister", "slammed". It's almost as if there's an editor imposed target / quota for excessively emotional words on the first page.

Slammed, I dont know why but it triggers me.

agree with that, I also click on "no interested"