Why are we putting up with clickbait?
We have the agency to solve this in a way that is good for us individually AND for the companies
Here’s an idea: what if your browser automatically gave all YouTube videos a descriptive title based on the transcript? It might look like this:
I love this idea because it punishes with discernment. If you get a lot of spam ads, you can use an adblocker, but that punishes the good & bad actors equally. This type of solution doesn’t block you from seeing anything, it just increases transparency. And transparency helps the good guys.
Notice that the descriptive titles for good videos are NOT less interesting. Tom Scott’s video about a house with “rotating plumbing & gas pipelines” is genuinely fascinating. I might have clicked on Kurzgesagt’s video just to know “what IS the most dangerous weapon, if it’s not nuclear”, but now I can make a better decision for myself.
This is win win marketing: people who make genuinely good videos stand out, people who make crappy things get way less views.
Why don’t we have this yet?
There are lots of things in society that no one actually wants, and yet they persist. Clickbait is one of them. A reason it persists is that most people see “consumers” and “corporations” as “us vs them”. There are tons of ways to improve things for both sides, but no one is really looking for them because we think anything that makes companies more money must be bad for consumers.
The only people who benefit from clickbait are people that make low quality videos & know how to market them. This makes it harder for people that create high quality content to stand out & make money, which makes the entire ecosystem less valuable for consumers AND companies. It’s lose-lose.
This tool actually exists
Good news: someone made this! It works great, and people who use it love it. It’s called DeArrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It crowd sources the titles, which means it doesn’t work for all videos until someone submits something, requires people to vote, etc. You could make a version of this that uses a local LLM. You could even tweak it so that the titles summarize what you personally want to know about most new videos. And why stop there? Why not news articles too?
User behavior that helps themselves AND companies cannot be stopped
Most attempts to make things better fail if they make things worse for another group of people. This is a feature of society, not a bug. Ad blockers fall into this category. I’d rather see community notes on ads that elevate good companies & punish scammers.
And we don’t need corporations or governments to do this. The beautiful thing about this “rewrite clickbait” idea is that it works even if you are the only person in the world that uses it. It makes your life better, it fixes the problem for you. If more people adopt it, then it starts to shape the media landscape. Once the companies realize this is actually making them more money (users spend more time watching high quality things, serving ads to happy users is more valuable), then they just implement it in the platform. This is how you weaponize “companies only care about profit” for the benefit of all.
I’ve learned that apparently “90% of Twitch’s best product features” happened this way, prototyped first by users trying to make things better for themselves before it spread & was officially adopted. I wrote about this here:
’s latest essay had a phrase I can’t stop thinking about:
the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against
This hostile information environment we find ourselves in is one such case. The people in power can’t fix this without us. It’s going to take a conspiracy between the good guys across all sides to make it better, but we have the blueprint now.
P.S. right before I finished writing this, someone showed me this screenshot of YouTube testing out AI generated summaries, so it’s already spreading! Thank you Dame.
Installed DeArrow, thank you.
Damn, I love your thinking. And I would love an extension for this.