I hate those titels, too, but let's be honest: They're a necessary sharade. If you want to earn any money from YouTube or even just get views, you need to please the algorithm. Sure, you can work without them, but it's like driving with the handbrake pulled.

The content of the videos is what matters. The advertising is annoying, but necessary.

Derek of Veritaseum made a video laying out why "clickbait-y" titles like that are necessary, and I feel like it makes a pretty good case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

The tl;dw is that the most effective titles come right up against the edge of what an average target audience member would consider unacceptable on the axes of withheld information (to create a curiosity gap) and misleading sensationalism (to maximise the perceived importance of the topic); and you have to play the game of having effective titles because otherwise no one clicks on your video and it stops being recommended to people who would find it valuable.

I felt that this change reduced the quality of Veritasium, for me. I know it's just the titles, but it feels more bait and switch.

I understand why he did it, but wish he didn't. If I was a leader at YouTube I'd be pretty concerned about this - long term, it drives your platform in the direction of clickbait. Yeah there's benefits to that, but could also turn into a competitive weakness for YouTube. I think they should improve the recommender to make this unnecessary.

I saw that video. I don't need an explanation of why it's being done, it's pretty obvious and it works.

What I'm saying is that we can do better than 50 year olds making child-like expressions with clickbaity titles.

When he did this is basically when I decided to no longer watch his videos, and I don't regret this decision.

I think we can aspire to better than that. I do at least.

People click those titles and don't click other titles. No one cares that's it's not sufficiently uppity to satisfy the intellectual elite.

Evidently, at least two people care.

Really? Titles that are factually reflective of content are “uppity”, and not liking obviously intentional click-bait titles makes you “intellectual elite”? Wow. Welcome to the idiocracy.

Don't shoot the messenger

Alternatively, you could accept what is at root a rather small thing, and adjust you own reaction. That’s what I did when those kind of titles started to become common.

I deal with it, of course. I'm a heavy Youtube user. The net result is positive.

But it's extremely distasteful and I'm not willing to lower my standards because of this stupidity.

It’s not even about your or my standards. The overall tone of media sets the standard. There’s already a rising tide of anti-intellectualism that seeks to actively disparage intellectual thought as “uppity” as described in a comment above. This is not healthy for society. If you wonder how it was that in history, waves of advancement in knowledge seem to be followed by periods where things seem to go backwards, I find it easy to imagine that popular anti-intellectual sentiment would have looked very similar. Distrust of “elites” and disparagement of the philosophies of those “elites”, throwing out the baby with the bath water.

EDITED to add that what attaches itself to such sentiment (or stokes it), are cynical political actors happy to gain power irrespective of the cost to society.

>you need to please the algorithm

Don't blame the algorithm. Blame people themselves. It's not YouTube's fault that people find those kinds of titles more interesting.

Google put huge amounts of effort into punishing the search rankings of sites that attempted to manipulate their ranking in shady ways. YouTube could put in some amount of effort towards the same end.

Of course, that would probably reduce engagement...

"Making people want to click the video" is not shady in the same sense as SEO. A comparable trick might be jamming a bunch of keywords into the description.

Your real complaint is that people like stupid videos, but that's not YouTube's problem or fault.

The concern with SEO is that the goal is to drive traffic to a site without meaningfully improving the content. Doesn't the same argument apply here? If the video doesn't change, and it's just the title and thumbnail changing in an effort to get more clicks, how is that materially different from SEO?

Because it's the viewer deciding to choose the video, not some algorithm deciding what they get to choose from.

> Google put huge amounts of effort into punishing the search rankings of sites that attempted to manipulate their ranking in shady ways.

From the search results I get, it appears that they abandoned that effort long ago.