Linus's Disturbing Trend to Clickbait

[AshleyAshes]

ITT: People slowly discover the secret that LMG is a commercial enterprise.

[AxelRantila]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

1: off memory, he said all linustechtips content would remain free, nerdsports is a series by vessel, for which they hired the LMG crew to make. linus has indicated at several points he's made similar content that never even made it to the public (off memory, they made some internal videos for intel staff training or something.)

No he certainly said all LMG content would be free, not just LTT content.

I personally think that the biggest issue with Nerdsports was that it was announced poorly and that at least some of the criticism could be avoid if it was announced more elegantly. However, I can understand the people who feel like it was a matter of them being "saved by technicalities".

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

2: linus is very direct to these companies that they accept no BS towards their audience,

I am not so sure about that anymore

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

3: as i said, it is what attracts the viewers, without viewers there is no money, and unfortunately those thumbnails are just what works at the moment.

I started watching LTT because of good content and reasonable thumbnails in a time of clickbait

[nicklmg]

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Looking at the views of their current videos get I feel like the whole "we get more views now" is just confirmation bias.

I mean, they started doing it very shortly before CES, at which they made multiple videos a day about brand new product. No shit your views will go up from that, but they would have gone up with the old thumbnails too.

View average for first 24 hours of a video's life based on 16 videos directly prior to the thumbnail change: 372,687

View average for first 24 hours of a video's life based on 16 videos directly after the change (normal content, NOT including CES videos): 460,281

Of course we're not going to try to make any kind of ridiculous claim that the entire difference is based on the new thumbnails, but it would be just as ridiculous to say that the new thumbnails have had NO part in that change.

 

Anyway, my general reply:
The old thumbnails were usually dark, cluttered, unclear, and (in pretty much every case) ugly. The goal of the new thumbnails is brightness and clarity. Have they been perfect so far? Hell no. Just like every new practice we implement, there will be stumbling blocks, and some of them will suck. But once we have a chance to work out the issues, decide on the intended design language (it's a lot of trial and error right now, need a pretty significant sample size to figure out what works best), I'd be extremely surprised if the majority of people taking issue with them now will continue to dislike the new style once we've worked out the day-to-day problems.

 

If the new style is making you overlook our videos, then that is really unfortunate. Obviously that is the opposite of the intent here. But, anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people saying that they've noticed our videos more often with the new style so... it's hard to really take a side on that one for me.

 

This actually reminds me quite a bit of Q1 last year when we were in a pretty heavy "pilot" season. Every day I saw complaints about "you guys are out of ideas," "your content sucks," "why is there a new series every single day," etc. We carried the same line - give us some time to work out the kinks, figure out what works and what doesn't, and then make your judgement from there. And today, I think in large part due to the experimentation that we did last year, we have some of the most diverse tech content on the platform, and I fully believe that the majority of our viewers enjoy that aspect of our channel.

 

Not trying to downplay the complaints here - we're certainly taking feedback into account. Just giving my side as one member of LMG who is involved in some of the decision making around this stuff.

 

6 hours ago, Modzy said:

That works when you looking at 10 videos per day in your feed... 

But when only 10% of your daily list looks like this.... what are you going to click on? you don't stop and read the title of every single video, because you can't even see the title of most of these as you're scrolling through.

I don't think this was the point you were trying to make, but just glancing over that list our thumbnail is actually the most eyegrabbing one on that page for me. Maybe that's some kind of inherent bias as I've seen ours before but haven't seen the others, but yeah... just my 2c.

[LAwLz]

Just now, nicklmg said:

View average for first 24 hours of a video's life based on 16 videos directly prior to the thumbnail change: 372,687

View average for first 24 hours of a video's life based on 16 videos directly after the change (normal content, NOT including CES videos): 460,281

Well, Linus said on Twitter that "overall views are way up" on January 1. So let's look at the videos with the new thumbnails shall we? I have ignored WAN show videos because they still use the old style thumbnails.

 

Videos with new thumbnails published before Linus said views were way up:

DIT Speakers	678,923
Intel CPU Innovation	894,854
Weirdest Shit on Amazon	826,386
Handy Tech episode 14	450,293
4K Blu-Ray	833,517
"Waterproof" Hard Drive	532,753
"Live" Case Review	434,010
Electric Bike	330,310
Macbook Pro 2016	1,213,816
Computer Destruction	872,368
Airpods	1,433,502
Average views:	772,794

 

The 11 videos with the old style thumbnails that were just before the new ones:

Razer Blade Pro	881,744
Asus G20CB	1,059,697
Desk PC	1,110,712
PS4 Pro	805,843
Best Wireless headphones	394,383
Corsair 570X	488,368
DIY Monitor Housing	558,676
Secret Santa	444,468
Korean Curved Ultrawide	2,063,663
Case Air Pressure test	469,806
Rift vs Vive	486,776
Average Views:	796,740

 

So even when your average views were going down (at least with today's numbers), Linus still said "views are way up". You can twist numbers a lot of ways to suit your agenda.

[nicklmg]

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Well, Linus said on Twitter that "overall views are way up" on January 1. So let's look at the videos with the new thumbnails shall we? I have ignored WAN show videos because they still use the old style thumbnails.

 

Videos with new thumbnails published before Linus said views were way up:

DIT Speakers	678,923
Intel CPU Innovation	894,854
Weirdest Shit on Amazon	826,386
Handy Tech episode 14	450,293
4K Blu-Ray	833,517
"Waterproof" Hard Drive	532,753
"Live" Case Review	434,010
Electric Bike	330,310
Macbook Pro 2016	1,213,816
Computer Destruction	872,368
Airpods	1,433,502
Average views:	772,794

 

The 11 videos with the old style thumbnails that were just before the new ones:

Razer Blade Pro	881,744
Asus G20CB	1,059,697
Desk PC	1,110,712
PS4 Pro	805,843
Best Wireless headphones	394,383
Corsair 570X	488,368
DIY Monitor Housing	558,676
Secret Santa	444,468
Korean Curved Ultrawide	2,063,663
Case Air Pressure test	469,806
Rift vs Vive	486,776
Average Views:	796,740

 

So even when your average views were going down (at least with today's numbers), Linus still said "views are way up". You can twist numbers a lot of ways to suit your agenda.

Razer Blade Pro, ASUS G20CB, Ultimate DIY Desk, PS4 Pro, and Best Wireless Headphones all were using the "new" style of thumbnails lol (no text, solid background)...

[AxelRantila]

1 hour ago, nicklmg said:

This actually reminds me quite a bit of Q1 last year when we were in a pretty heavy "pilot" season. Every day I saw complaints about "you guys are out of ideas," "your content sucks," "why is there a new series every single day," etc. We carried the same line - give us some time to work out the kinks, figure out what works and what doesn't, and then make your judgement from there. And today, I think in large part due to the experimentation that we did last year, we have some of the most diverse tech content on the platform, and I fully believe that the majority of our viewers enjoy that aspect of our channel.

I'm not against new series, but I don't want all of them canned after just 1-2 episodes. That doesn't mean that you have to plan out 10 episodes in advance down to every detail, just don't create a new series that will only get 1-2 episodes.

1 hour ago, nicklmg said:

Not trying to downplay the complaints here - we're certainly taking feedback into account. Just giving my side as one member of LMG who is involved in some of the decision making around this stuff.

I understand that. One thing I do think could be improved is that you are more transparent with the fact that you are hearing our feedback instead of having us guess if you are doing it or not.

[LAwLz]

30 minutes ago, nicklmg said:

Razer Blade Pro, ASUS G20CB, Ultimate DIY Desk, PS4 Pro, and Best Wireless Headphones all were using the "new" style of thumbnails lol (no text, solid background)...

I see. I started counting the "new thumbnails" from the Airpods episode, because that was the first one with Linus making a stupid face with bright colors and shit. I guess you can say that the G20CB also had that going on. I don't think I've seen anyone complain about the Razer, PS4 Pro or bluetooth thumbnails.

If you go to the previous page you can even see someone using the PS4 Pro as an example of how the thumbnails used to be, in contrast with the WiFi thumbnail.

 

 

Grouping these thumbnails:

With these:

Is quite dishonest.

 

I will totally call bullshit on you if you try and claim "what do you mean? They are both the new thumbnail format". One format is nice and pleasant, and the other one is jpeg formatted cancer. I'll let you figure out which label goes on what category.

[nicklmg]

1 minute ago, AxelRantila said:

I'm not against new series, but I don't want all of them canned after just 1-2 episodes. That doesn't mean that you have to plan out 10 episodes in advance down to every detail, just don't create a new series that will only get 1-2 episodes.

I understand that. One thing I do think could be improved is that you are more transparent with the fact that you are hearing our feedback instead of having us guess if you are doing it or not.

I hear that - but the whole point of a pilot is that you do 1-2 episodes, see if it works, and then make a decision on whether or not to continue from there. I understand that it sucks to have a series end if it was interesting to you, but there are numerous reasons (no general interest, ideas more difficult to either realize or execute than we initially expected, format doesn't make sense long-term, etc.) that we may opt not to continue a series, and we can only truly understand many of those reasons once we do execute at least 1-2 episodes of a concept.

 

I agree that we could do a better job of that - apologies for the lack there. With that said, I do feel like we often ARE more transparent than many people think, but it's not seen by everyone... For example my posts here. Most people won't see a reply on the 13th page of a thread on the forum. It's a constant battle between making it public enough so that the people who DO care can see it, but not making it intrusive for the people who don't care and just want to get entertaining content about tech. Definitely a balancing act there.

[PCMasterDebater]

The thumbnails moved me from Linustechtips over to Gamers Nexus. No BS over at GN. Whatever nonsense LTT is doing with their childish thumbnails opened me up to new Youtubers that have excellent content without the flashy "click me" bs. I have to thank LTT for changing. I'm not rarely watching their videos now.

[Krytern]

2 hours ago, nicklmg said:

The goal of the new thumbnails is brightness and clarity.

There is trying out new thumbnails for brightness and clarity and there is using a thumbnail with a guy holding a pickaxe as if he is going to attack someone, on a video about WiFi.

 

There is trying out new thumbnails for brightness and clarity and there is looking like Buzzfeed and bloggers.

 

You are using blatant clickbait like the pickaxes and you are picking styles, like the retarded faces, that is usually used by channels with extremely poor content.

 

There is trying out new thumbnails for brightness and clarity and there is picking the worst thumbnails you could choose for the quality of your content.

[nicklmg]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I see. I started counting the "new thumbnails" from the Airpods episode, because that was the first one with Linus making a stupid face with bright colors and shit. I guess you can say that the G20CB also had that going on. I don't think I've seen anyone complain about the Razer, PS4 Pro or bluetooth thumbnails.

If you go to the previous page you can even see someone using the PS4 Pro as an example of how the thumbnails used to be, in contrast with the WiFi thumbnail.

 

 

Grouping these thumbnails:

With these:

Is quite dishonest.

 

I will totally call bullshit on you if you try and claim "what do you mean? They are both the new thumbnail format". One format is nice and pleasant, and the other one is jpeg formatted cancer. I'll let you figure out which label goes on what category.

As I said above - we're still working out the kinks and figuring out what works and what doesn't. Not trying to equate the two formats, just trying to make sure we all have an understanding on when the shift in prep (or mindset I guess) happened and when the experimentation began - that's the point that we're judging the success of "new" vs "old" from, so if we're not starting from the same point there's no hope that we can even start to have a conversation about the success or failure of a change (and the success or failure of progressions within that change).

 

Anyway, I've given my current thoughts here. We'll continue to take the feedback into account and monitor the thread(s) but it's unlikely that we'll reply.

 

Might sound like a bs platitude, but we do legitimately appreciate the fact that people care enough about our channel and our content to get involved like this, even when it's intended as a negative towards us. It's a pretty special thing to be a part of.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, nicklmg said:

Might sound like a bs platitude, but we do legitimately appreciate the fact that people care enough about our channel and our content to get involved like this, even when it's intended as a negative towards us. It's a pretty special thing to be a part of.

That's the right mentality to have.

I think most people reacting negatively towards this is because they care about the channel, not because people want to be assholes.

So don't get discourages!

[Misanthrope]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Sellout:

noun: a person who compromises his or her personal values, integrity, talent, or the like, for money or personal advancement.

 

 

Linus has:

1) Lied about not making Vessel exclusive content. Now luckily for us Vessel died and the content was released to everyone, but that was not something Linus had planned.

2) Been sponsored by multiple companies, and recommended several products which he has later apologized for (or stopped being sponsored by) because it turned out the product/company was bad and his audience got mad at him. This goes against his words that he would always stay honest and only recommend things he personally liked.

3) He doesn't like the thumbnails himself, but he keeps using them because he thinks it makes him more money.

 

 

Three examples of Linus selling out. He is a massive sellout. Face facts.

 

You can still like his content though.

To add, even if he admits he sells out its not like he is a musician or artists when integrity is demanded of them, he is just an entertainer. 

 

Even if you tune in for the rare occasion LTT fucking benchmarks anything at all, that content is so sparing right now you probably look at tons of other, number crunching oriented channels. 

 

I watch for them keks and I don't care if they're sponsored. 

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, nicklmg said:

I hear that - but the whole point of a pilot is that you do 1-2 episodes, see if it works, and then make a decision on whether or not to continue from there. I understand that it sucks to have a series end if it was interesting to you, but there are numerous reasons (no general interest, ideas more difficult to either realize or execute than we initially expected, format doesn't make sense long-term, etc.) that we may opt not to continue a series, and we can only truly understand many of those reasons once we do execute at least 1-2 episodes of a concept.

 

I agree that we could do a better job of that - apologies for the lack there. With that said, I do feel like we often ARE more transparent than many people think, but it's not seen by everyone... For example my posts here. Most people won't see a reply on the 13th page of a thread on the forum. It's a constant battle between making it public enough so that the people who DO care can see it, but not making it intrusive for the people who don't care and just want to get entertaining content about tech. Definitely a balancing act there.

I'm wondering if you can touch on just what happened with the Laptop Revival video? Was the team rushed due to other engagements? (CES?) That video, even completely ignoring the terrible Thumbnails (Very unrepresentative of the content, in that case), the video content itself was not up to the normal LTT standards.

 

The content was far too basic, so as to not engage experienced enthusiasts. And they wouldn't find anything in that video "educational" anyway. On top of that, it wasn't in depth enough to be useful to people who might actually learn something from that type of video. About the only thing anyone might have learned from that, is how to swap out the HDD. They certainly didn't learn how to clone an OS, install Windows, things to think about or consider when doing such a task, etc.

 

I understand that it's not exactly like you can go back and fix it (Well I guess you could reshoot or upload a revised version, but I'm not counting on that), but I'd like to at least know that the LMG team has learned from that particular mistake.

 

Guide videos are some of the best content you guys do, when you do it right. The Laptop Revival video was an example of how to do it wrong, in my opinion. I can't think of anyone who would have benefited from that video.

[Krytern]

18 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

To add, even if he admits he sells out its not like he is a musician or artists when integrity is demanded of them, he is just an entertainer. 

He directly reviews products for consumers.

[JoostinOnline]

I think we all agree that funny thumbnails on Youtube videos aren't clickbait.

 

Speaking of clickbait, the funniest one I've ever seen was something like "Facebook is combating clickbait (and you won't believe how they're doing it!)"

[Misanthrope]

21 minutes ago, Krytern said:

He directly reviews products for consumers.

How often? That's 1 out of maybe 10 videos. In fact he could easily drop the reviews and I bet many would not notice before a major release like Vega. 

 

Quick question: how many z270 motherboards has LTT reviewed? Exactly. They covered mostly only Kaby chips and rather superfluously at that. 

 

LTT isn't about reviews anymore. 

[CoolMarquis97]

I wouldn't consider what LTT does as clickbait. Maybe they are a bit excessive but I don't see what they do as clickbate. 

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

How often? That's 1 out of maybe 10 videos. In fact he could easily drop the reviews and I bet many would not notice before a major release like Vega. 

 

Quick question: how many z270 motherboards has LTT reviewed? Exactly. They covered mostly only Kaby chips and rather superfluously at that. 

 

LTT isn't about reviews anymore. 

To be fair, there's not much excitement in doing Motherboard reviews anymore. The main differences are simply what feature sets they have. Reviewing one motherboard per chipset might not be bad. But if LTT started reviewing all the z270 motherboards, that would get very old, very quickly...

 

Plus, I don't really trust them to properly benchmark any hardware differences

[Misanthrope]

39 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

To be fair, there's not much excitement in doing Motherboard reviews anymore. The main differences are simply what feature sets they have. Reviewing one motherboard per chipset might not be bad. But if LTT started reviewing all the z270 motherboards, that would get very old, very quickly...

 

Plus, I don't really trust them to properly benchmark any hardware differences

The former is because of the latter. 

[mmaatt747]

53 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

The former is because of the latter. 

I disagree, since the lack of excitement comes from so many of the functions that motherboards were previously responsible for are now handled by the CPU.  Just like dalekphalm said, it's only the features that motherboards provide that make up any real differences these days.

 

You just don't see big differences in benchmarks from one mobo to another anymore

[ThinkWithPortals]

To be honest, ever since they introduced the new thumbnail format (during or perhaps slightly before CES?) I've just given up on watching LTT and CSF videos entirely. I just don't like the direction they're going, I much prefer the more no-nonsense approach of other channels.

[dalekphalm]

29 minutes ago, mmaatt747 said:

I disagree, since the lack of excitement comes from so many of the functions that motherboards were previously responsible for are now handled by the CPU.  Just like dalekphalm said, it's only the features that motherboards provide that make up any real differences these days.

 

You just don't see big differences in benchmarks from one mobo to another anymore

There is the idea that the power features on a motherboard may help with OCing, but I assume that only helps massive OCs with heavily overvolted CPU's, and not normal ones.

 

This is one thing they could test, but it would kind of be a one off video. And I'm going to assume the results would be the following: It depends on the specific board, and better VRM and power circuitry doesn't inherently mean a better OC.

[Misanthrope]

44 minutes ago, mmaatt747 said:

I disagree, since the lack of excitement comes from so many of the functions that motherboards were previously responsible for are now handled by the CPU.  Just like dalekphalm said, it's only the features that motherboards provide that make up any real differences these days.

 

You just don't see big differences in benchmarks from one mobo to another anymore

No: that's because you aren't particularly interested in it. Which is my point Linus and his audience as a whole isn't that interested in hardware reviews at this point. Doesn't matters if it started as an unboxing channel that's just no longer true. 

 

So saying he is a hardware reviewer, no. That's a very small part of the channels today. 

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

No: that's because you aren't particularly interested in it. Which is my point Linus and his audience as a whole isn't that interested in hardware reviews at this point. Doesn't matters if it started as an unboxing channel that's just no longer true. 

 

So saying he is a hardware reviewer, no. That's a very small part of the channels today. 

Interested in what, though? I love hardware reviews. I just don't think Motherboard hardware reviews are particularly relevant anymore. It would be nice if they reviewed each "platform" and perhaps each "chipset" though. And in each of those videos, they could do a roundup of various motherboards.

 

The problem is that even in each chipset, there are way too many motherboards to choose from, with the vast majority of them, only having minor feature differences, and performance being unchanged.

 

Would you prefer if they simply reviewed every motherboard that got released?