
YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form - dwighttk
https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-going-to-sell/
======
mattbierner
This post made me want to re-read "You Are Not a Gadget." One of Lanier's
points in that book is that technology can both augment expression and bound
it. The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your
thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up, whereas a
simple textbox would let you note whatever you want about the content (text is
also harder to monetize and analyze and control).

I personally have been noticing more and more how technology and algorithms
seem to bounding expression online and off, particularly around content
creation, but also with influencers and personal branding and so on. It feels
like 90% of the shit being pumped out is super amplified to draw notice or for
signaling, and while this is not a new phenomenon of course, it still feels
weird to see ordinary people at restaurants taking pictures of their food, or
sucking up to some corporation online for the chance to win a prize

I feel this pressure too. The pressure to get noticed. To tailor content to
what will rack of the most views. To post that tweet that will make me look
like a smart, funny guy who has something valuable to say and oh by the way
you should totally follow me. And I hate it. And I try not to care about
numbers. But it still feels really shitty when something you spent a month
working on and genuinely find really cool gets a total of ten views while a
picture of a goat in a sweater just when viral. And what if the audience is
right?

There has to be something better. I hope that we can grow beyond changing
ourselves to fit the algorithm, and re-focus on using technology to create new
ways of sharing and expressing and relating to each other. One fun example of
this that Lanier gave: creating technology that would let people communicate
like cuttlefish (specifically the shifting skin colors and textures). That
optimistic vision still feels as radical and fresh today as it did when I
first read the book in 2010. I just hope it's not too late

~~~
ILikeConemowk
>I hope that we can grow beyond changing ourselves to fit the algorithm

I personally think you are in for a very rude awakening. This is exactly what
people are trying _not_ to do with Machine Learning. It is always, almost,
about profiling you, about finding out who you are in order to offer you what
you already know, to limit your horizon, to "tailor" your "experience" and the
span of possibilities.

As a very technical fellow told me: "when you read three political news in a
row we set a badge, you are now politically minded."

This, sadly, doesn't fit your yearning for us growing "beyond changing
ourselves to fit the algorithm."

My prediction is that it will get worst before it gets any better at all.

~~~
glaberficken
Which makes me think... ...would someone be willing to develop a content
recommendation engine that filters out all the bullshit on the web? Especially
valuable would be one that is also immune to "filter bubble" effects.

~~~
alanfalcon
I think you have to be exposed to the bullshit. I explicitly follow people on
Twitter I strongly disagree with; that sometimes outright outrage and disgust
me. I don’t interact with them, but I read what they’re saying and what people
in their filter bubble say back to them. That’s my best solution to trying to
escape too small a filter bubble of my own.

~~~
nekopa
I do the same, and it started accidentally. I followed someone on twitter who
I thought was someone else, and they are hard alt right. After getting some
updates from them in my email, I realized my mistake, and went on twitter to
unfollow them, and got to reading their feed was was atrocious from my
viewpoint, but I saw that it was good to know how the "enemy" was thinking,
what their thought process and logic trains are. So I kept following them.

At first I stopped in from time to time to get my outrage on (I never interact
with them, just read) and to feel smug that I am intellectually superior to
them and their followers.

But then I realized that if way back, at the very beginning of your thought
process you start from a false premise, everything else can follow reasonable
and logical methods. It's almost like chaos theory, small differences in the
starting position can have vastly outsized differences at the end.

I've used this experience to go back and look at my "starting" positions. And
I've horrified myself too. So on the whole it's been an enlightening
experience.

So now I can say that I am firmly on my way to understanding them now (and
myself too) even though I diagram with them vehemently.

I don't use Facebook much, but if I did, I would want to be able to tell the
algorithm "take 50% of what you want to show me based on my preferences and
show me the exact opposite"

------
taneq
Reminds me of the 'Dreamworks Face' that you see on so many animated movie
posters.
([http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DreamWorksFace](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DreamWorksFace))

~~~
artursapek
Wow, it has a name. I have noticed that stupid expression is basically the
cover of every kid's animated movie for the last decade.

~~~
jxramos
I love it when people articulate/identify a pattern and coin it with
something. "Dreamworks face", works for me.

------
jackgolding
Has anyone else noticed how much this min-maxing is effecting all different
areas of the world? I played the last World of Warcraft expansion and got to
the stage where I could start raiding (Blizzard is trying to make this easier
to break into for casual players) and 95% of raiders only wanted to raid with
those who had already done the raid before and had an item level higher than
anything the raid drops!

I find this really frustrating in the arts and entertainment space - the bar
for entry seems to be getting higher and higher because of these ultra
competitive optimisations. I guess the difference now is that people view
making video content on the internet as a career (or at least a way to make
money) rather than just as a hobby.

~~~
angarg12
I was talking with a colleague at the coffee machine, telling him how this
weekend I went to the supermarket to do the groceries, and how it was a pain
to carry bags around.

He replied 'I haven't stepped in a supermarket in months, I do all my
groceries online. It is much more efficient'.

I have to admit I felt dumb for not optimising my time like he does. But
reflecting on it, I feel sad that our private time is becoming a soulless
corporate enterprise where everything has to be optimised.

~~~
douglaswlance
Why soulless? Your life is what you make it. Build meaning yourself.

~~~
jerf
I've always found it a bit odd when people are singing elegies to the joys of
human contact in... a supermarket checkout line. There's no point in my life
in which that was a serious source of "human contact" and I think anyone who
can't say that has a problem that needs immediate addressing. One that can't
be fixed by complaining about how impersonal shopping is now.

I do see human contact in the grocery store... it's between the _employees_ of
the store, who know each other, and actually have some sort of relationship,
not with the faceless masses that transiently stream through. Of course they
don't get to just chat the whole time, but humans being humans, they manage to
find some time.

~~~
alanfalcon
I don't find joy in a supermarket checkout line, but I have witnessed joy in
some people (customers, mostly older, who found a way to stand out from the
masses and have a face). Perhaps those who take the time to sing elegies
actually do find personal joy and fulfillment even a checkout line even if you
and I do not.

------
aphextron
Alternatively, it serves as a pretty good filter for content I will actively
try to avoid. Playing a video and immediately hearing that "HEY GUYS" voice
makes me click the back button instantly, and block the channel.

~~~
aidenn0
Can we perhaps combine all of the clickbait memes into a single form?

"One weird trick to find the 13 most extreme reaction faces to mundane topics
(you won't believe how number 5 lets you make money from home!)"

~~~
gitgud
Plus

    
    
        COPS CALLED!! (NOT CLICKBAIT)

~~~
marksomnian
[ALMOST DIED] GONE SEXUAL

------
bitwize
I find it funny that the AVGN is featured; he's been making that face since
before YouTube's been monetizing. He may be the _originator_ of the
phenomenon.

It used to be that in order to drive clicks you needed to have female cleavage
in your thumbnail. One YouTuber (RadicalSoda) still includes an image of a
cartoon woman showing generous cleavage in each of his videos, despite himself
being the only person actually appearing in most of them.

And then there's YouTube _voice_. I don't even think I can imitate it but
there's a distinctive cadence and inflection that YouTubers seem to have
embraced. I once saw a _ten-year-old_ use it in a toy-company-sponsored video.
Yes, ten-year-old kid paid to hawk toys on YouTube instead of just playing
with them or whatever. Then again, we have stories of some Hackernews hearing
their 3-year-old use "don't forget to like and subscribe!" as a farewell.

~~~
einr
_YouTube voice_

There's a link in the OP to an article analyzing this:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-l...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-
linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/)

------
pmuk
I’ve been uploading more content to YouTube recently and I noticed that their
AI automatically picks the video frame that has the most exaggerated facial
expression and uses this as the default thumbnail. This is probably why
YouTube face appears to be everywhere!

You can see it on this video:
[https://youtu.be/qhV4xCmPy4g](https://youtu.be/qhV4xCmPy4g)

I didn’t upload this thumbnail, YouTube picked it. If you looked through the
video manually you might not even notice that such an expressive YouTube face
was in there, but YouTube found it when I uploaded it and picked it as the
thumbnail.

~~~
sp332
Since you can't actually see the thumbnail on the video page (at least not on
the desktop version): [https://imgur.com/a/ohmLc](https://imgur.com/a/ohmLc)

~~~
pmuk
Thanks, I forgot that it just starts playing without the thumbnail.

------
jerf
The really interesting question to my mind is what comes next. This is a
wildfire sweeping across previously unspoiled plains, and yes, it's very
impressive and a bit destructive (fortunately these metaphorical plains aren't
built up with too many valuable bits of infrastructure) and worth a story...
but what comes after the fire sweeps through? What happens when the bulk of
people have already clicked on their thousand videos advertised like this and
realize there's no great need to click on 1,001? Obviously it doesn't mean a
nirvana will arise in which people will suddenly seek out "real" content, but
something will have to shift.

These YouTube thumbnails are basically pushing all the buttons in the human
brain as hard as they can without getting whacked from the site. The only
harder button I can think of is nudity but that won't be permitted. (In fact,
if you've never thought of it this way before, consider that it won't be
permitted precisely _because_ it hits the buttons too hard. There are reasons
beyond stereotypical moralistic "prudery" to resist slathering public spaces
in nudity and sexual content.) So once they burn out this button... which they
will, eventually, though much like the market, people can stay irrational
longer than you can stay solvent, so to speak... what comes next? People will
eventually develop a sort of mental callous around this and on one level or
another resist being yanked around so casually. What will replace it?

~~~
alanfalcon
The article points out the evolution and how we got from each prior step to
this point; it gets worse and worse and worse (and worse and worse)

~~~
jerf
It can't get worse forever, because the badness is bounded by the psychology
of the human brain on one side, and the YouTube-enforced standards on the
other. Something will eventually have to give.

~~~
Faark
Right. It only "got worse" while people tried to figure out the new medium.
Once we have a set of options that work well, I'd expect this to become a
basic meta game. People will recognize the current pattern and begin to
associate it with "old". Just like fashion. Probably a bit circular, aka old
trends will at some point re-emerge. This assumes YT will be around for long
enough, of cause.

------
itissid
Youtube "recommended" videos, if you open it in incognito mode are very
revolting to me. This is why. The quality is so atrocious. The video
recommendation in my google profile are not as bad, but every now and then it
will recommend me a picture of The Donald making an ugly face.

------
post_break
One of my favorite youtube channels does this:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw/videos)

And it bothers me. Even Linus put up a video explaining that he's sorry for
the annoying thumbnails but it drives views.

~~~
OhSoHumble
Here is Linus's video explaining why does "Youtube Face."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA)

~~~
chillacy
I thought that was well explained, he makes a good point. As another content
creator, you gotta play the game, and a 20% lift in views is nothing to scoff
at.

It's like the 90s where ads became increasingly intrusive to attract the
user's attention (flash animations, games, showing some skin, etc). But then
you had Google come along and say "text ads only", and that seems to have
curtailed how bad ads can get.

So whatever solution happens will have to happen from the top down.

------
doomlaser
It's the same with App Store icons as well —
[https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/708605183509528576](https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/708605183509528576)

------
nsxwolf
Channels that specialize in reviewing virtual reality content are especially
fun. Since the head mounted display obscures the eyes, they must make up for
the loss of expression with terrifyingly exaggerated gaping maws.

------
ccostes
They really are effective, though. The conscious part of me is actually turned
off by videos with these kinds of title images, but they still draw my
attention and produce an impulse to click.

~~~
peteretep
One day, I promise I will stop clicking on thumbnails that bait me with the
promise of something vaguely sexual. One day. Maybe. I hope.

~~~
matte_black
Would you be interested in a training program?

~~~
jerf
I've idly wondered sometimes about the effectiveness of a shock collar sort of
setup for oneself that allowed the conscious mind to hit the body with
something its more primal parts understand better than the mere disapproval of
the conscious mind, which it doesn't seem to much care about.

(I'm actually a bit concerned it might be _too_ effective. It may be the case
that anyone wise enough to properly use one has already worked out other
effective mechanisms to obtain the effect with less of the danger.)

~~~
peteretep
Friends of mine have convinced me to donate ~$2,000 to a particularly odious
political cause whenever I perform certain actions, like drinking alcohol or
smoking cigarettes outside of their allotted times. I have found this to be
remarkably effective in speaking the unconscious brain's language.

Also, this thing exists: [https://pavlok.com/](https://pavlok.com/)

------
GuB-42
I remember seeing a tutorial on making stock pictures. Doing exaggerated
expressions is their number one advise.

The idea is that these pictures will be in a library of thousands, and it has
to stand out, regular faces don't. It is not a YouTube thing. It happens even
in traditional newspapers as they battle against each other in the newsstand.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Newspapers did it before it was mainstream, with headlines that kept getting
bigger and more screamy.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Tabloids are absolutely terrible for it. Gigantic fonts, garish colors, all
caps all over the place.

------
artursapek
I did journalism in high school and in learning the art of page layout &
design was taught that putting faces on stuff is always a good idea. People
like faces. Faces draw readers in. It's sort of a universal idea that was
inevitably going to end up applying to mediums like YouTube.

Also, I wouldn't say all of these are clickbait. The Needle Drop's videos are
basically all just him making hilarious faces.

------
myt6fore
We should probably expand on this notion of Clickbait that assumes readers are
merely tricked into clicking. Catering to some 'lowely' urge is way we usually
think about these, but there is more.

Traditionally, clickbait refers to a type of optimisation for more 'static'
media outlets- those with more rigid publishing chain: writer <editor <owner.

Youtube's low barrier to publishing disrupts that, so we now have viewers
assuming editor + owner role with their newfound power of directing attention.
So now users demand to be catered to. Sense on entitlement is at the center of
this thing.

------
hartator
A good solution will be to go back to have the thumbnail a pick of the actual
video not an over-engineered art form.

~~~
egypturnash
People will just go back to inserting a carefully produced image as the very
first frame of their video.

~~~
written
Just make the algorithm select a random frame, and it will be solved.

~~~
exodust
The random frame may be a poor choice of representing the content to the point
of being worse than a photoshopped thumbnail.

It's definitely a problem. Clickbait thumbnails blatantly misleading people
into clicking. It comes down to poor link integrity, which Google was
apparently against at one time, now they basically encourage it.

There's great stuff on youtube, but the trash pile is bigger than ever and
gets more clicks.

The classic example one of the oldest custom thumbnails on youtube that I
recall, is that roller-coaster in mid air. Millions of views, as people
clicked to see a coaster they didn't know existed. Of course, the video has no
such coaster, and as a result thousands of dislikes. But who cares about
dislikes when you have 40m views and counting on a rubbish generic video with
misleading thumbnail.

------
kelukelugames
I hate that face so much. I always assumed it appeals to a younger crowd but
then I have friends my age who use similar profile pics on facebook.

~~~
kwoff
That was my assumption, too - cartoon, exaggeration, caricature, baby talk.

------
ZeroGravitas
Someone should make a Terminator style film, actually a book would probably
work better, where the robot apocalypse is hastened by a whole bunch of
different people, some kind of skeezy and up to no good but most just trying
to make an honest buck and not realising the impact of the out of control AI
they are working for until it's too late.

I mean, I know we are living through basically the same thing with climate
change and large corporations in reality but a novel would be cool too.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Daemon by Daniel Suarez is kind of like that, except it turns out the AI is
arguably good and not exactly an AI. It's an excellent book, with an excellent
sequel.

------
pragone
Seeing that always made me think that everything would be exaggerated, and the
video was likely not worth my time; I also spend very little time on YouTube,
so the two are probably related (namely that I don't like video-based content)

------
dmschulman
Andrew Huang immediately sprang to mind
[https://www.youtube.com/user/songstowearpantsto](https://www.youtube.com/user/songstowearpantsto)

He's a musician and synthesizer enthusiast, granted electronic music and
synths have taken on a pretty youthful market in recent years (thanks to
cheaper products and a larger acceptance of the genre) but Andrew becoming a
YouTube personality in this space was definitely met with backlash from the
community.

It wasn't for the content itself, I really respect the guy as both a musician
and video editor, but it's the gimmicky persona, the little "signature" things
he does in his videos, the all too-perfect sheen put on top of his content,
the silly faces on the video thumbnails that draw people's attention, the
inauthenticity of it all. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, at least in
the electronic music/synthesizer communities I visit (full of people who have
been working with synths and modular instruments since the 70s/80s).

Now I realize it's not just his gimmick, it's everyone who hopes to ranks'
gimmick!

------
paxys
Minor correction at:

> YouTube, a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet, Inc. — formerly
> Google, Inc.

YouTube isn't an Alphabet company, but still part of Google itself.

------
CydeWeys
Funny how I recently started realizing how obnoxious this was. And now to see
someone explicitly talking about it is really making it click into place.

Here's the exact channel that caused me to realize:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Davie504](https://www.youtube.com/user/Davie504)

------
jxramos
"""Taken cumulatively, there’s a surreal, Lynchian quality to the images. Few
things could ever be exciting enough to elicit these kinds of reactions, and
no one could possibly be this expressive. So what’s wrong with these people?
Were their brains tenderized?"""

This is a message I'm always teaching my kids "these are actors, they don't
act like normal people, they exaggerate and pretend, are fictional, etc".
They've seemed to pick up on the fact that these strange creatures before them
are truly out of our everyday experience and are treated accordingly rather
than taken as an actual subpopulation of folks they just haven't met yet.

------
rsmets
I've always that human form clickbait could really only be attributed to
walking through Amsterdam's red light district but this guy has a point!
Interesting read.

Side note is he coining the term "YouTube Face"? I've never heard that
before...

~~~
tomc1985
Amsterdam's Red Light district has got _nothin_ on Youtube. If you merged it
with Shibuya or Times Square, maybe. But what I saw there a few years ago was
downright demure in comparison to the clickbaity crap people try on YouTube.

------
amiga-workbench
Ah yes, the soyboy grimace.

------
tudorw
Maybe librarys would have been more popular if they had more cat books.

------
forkLding
Ironically, theres a call for please like and share at the bottom.

~~~
gruez
On a side note, do those CTAs actually work? I have a hard time believing
anyone reading one and thinking "I wasn't going to like/share/comment, but I
am now because of this reminder!"

~~~
zf00002
Only a personal anecdote; I have about 10 videos on Youtube. Most of them have
under 10k views each and not many comments. Those videos do not have any form
of CTA. The one video that does get comments even now 3+ years after being
posted is the one where I simply asked people to leave a comment on what their
experiences with the same hardware were.

------
m3kw9
And the YouTube Title. “You won’t believe what happens next”

~~~
einr
AND EVERYTHING IN CAPS ALWAYS

------
bitrazor123
Most captcha can be fooled with dedicated efforts.

------
mmaunder
The second last paragraph is a thing of beauty.

------
tzahola
4chan calls this the 'soyface'.

------
cup-of-tea
Interesting that it's only men shown. A quick look at popular female channels
show no YouTube Face, just pretty faces.

------
microcolonel
It's called acting. When people express things they have no real reason to
feel, it's called acting.

AVGN makes those faces all the way throughout his videos, because he is an
actor, and he is acting out an exaggeration of his frustrations with video
games. If it weren't acting, then you'd see the same level of crazy in common
video game review articles.

