Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it whenever YouTube titles and thumbnails come up, both to defend creators and to criticize the drift toward clickbait.
What it is
Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends overcast · 2021-08 · on “Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse”
YouTube allowing creators to change Title and Thumbnails as many times as they want after a video has been uploaded, and providing realtime analytics after a change is what is driving this. They basically are constantly optimizing, until they find what sticks. The crap you describe obviously does very well. Veritasium does a great video on this. [this video]
Recommends timdaub · 2021-11 · on “Tips For Making a Popular Open Source Project in 2021”
Actually, Veritasium posted a brilliant way for optimizing thumbnails and headlines to improve click-through rate on Youtube: [this video] I plead guilty and say that I've repeatedly posted the same link on HN but with different query parameters to understand its performance. But I've come to understand that users will notice this behavior and start to generally downvote. As a creator with a small audience, the only success with tapping into a high throughput feedback loop has been by painstakingly write articles and submit them one by one to HN. I've gotten much better at it already and frankly I've also noticed that engagement and "likes" isn't everything either. I've realized too that if you t
Recommends LordDragonfang · 2022-04 · on “I stopped working on black hole information loss”
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. [this video] 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.
Recommends mierle · 2022-09 · on “The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube”
Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating. [1] [this video]
Recommends jerf · 2023-09 · on “How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life”
The video in question for reference: [this video] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known ou
Cites avnigo · 2021-08 · on “The Clickbaitification of Netflix”
Veritasium talks about thumbnail and title experimentation on YouTube, and argues for the need to do so on platforms that surface up and recommend content to users: [this video]
Cites james-skemp · 2021-08 · on “Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse”
Veritasium did a video about this recently, actually. I got the picture and didn't finish it, but it helped me realize how YouTube has pushed junk to me, despite trying to subscribe to quality channels. [this video]
Cites pininja · 2021-10 · on “What a solid made of electrons looks like”
I think this is the same argument made by Veritasium - poorly summarized: do whatever it takes to hook people in that have never heard the topic before, then teach them something new. [this video]