this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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This guy always has such dramatic YouTube thumbnail image face
I would say that's YouTube in general, but even that's not true. Practically all media frequently focuses on faces.
YouTube thumbnails, social media, the rise of selfies, video calling, portraits (always been one of the most common forms of art), film posters (disproportionately feature the faces of their characters), etc.
Humans love seeing faces. We are drawn to faces, it's linked to us being an intelligent social species with complex social and familial structures. It's ingrained in us to place great attention and recognition on faces, and to glean information from them.
In fact, our brains are so obsessed with facial recognition, that we often see faces where none exist (pareidolia). That's how strong this effect is.
I get that people on Lemmy/Reddit act like seeing a face in the thumbnail is the worst thing ever, but creators do it because people want to see faces. All the data points to people being more engaged when we see faces.
And honestly, compared to other forms of trying to get people interested, such as using misleading or untrue titles, ragebait, failing to mention the video is sponsored in a way that undermines the integrity of the video, etc., including a face in a thumbnail is just about the least troublesome avenue. A face in a thumbnail is completely and utterly harmless.
Eh, I just ignore thumbnails in general. If I'm subscribed, it's because I like the content, so only the title matters. If I'm looking for videos to watch, I actively avoid the ones with click-bait thumbnails because I know it's going to be a bad video.
You probably think you do that. But this is the same kind of take as people who say "advertising doesn't work on me"
You're probably not the exception to human psychology.
That's a statistically reasonable assessment, but I don't think it's true, at least for me. I've looked at lists of the top YouTubers, and I've watched pretty much none of their videos. The channels I subscribe to generally have between 500k and 2M subscribers, so they're somewhat popular, but far from the top. I've unsubscribed from channels because they started doing too much of the clickbait crap, their sponsor blocks got too long, etc. I have disabled the recommendation feed (by disabling watch history), and only watch content I've subscribed to outside the few times I specifically look something up, and my experience with YouTube got at better.
I don't know that what to tell you.