Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective" video.

  1.  @KyleTheFolf  I would guess the decision makers (maybe called product owner?) has just prioritized other features that they focus on. Software development faces the problem that you have way more ideas about how to improve the product than you have actual resources to implement. As a result, you have to drop lots of great ideas and implement only the features you think are most important. That said, I still cannot figure out why they decided that doing the extra work to change behavior of dislike button was worth doing. Or why they removed the feature to allow community to offer subtitles to the channels.
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  2. i just realized that you could actually make the thumbnails to stand out more simply by having a blue sidebar like in this video at 17:19. When most thumbnails at Youtube do not have single color siderbars, using one could make it seem different from everything else!
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  3. I think the examples you provided at the end were definitely legitbait – show the most interesting thing about the video as the title and thumbnail. A clickbait (for me) is when the title or thumbnail intentionally witholds the only real piece of information provided just to get people to click it, or the title or thumbnail is intentionally misleading and promises stuff that the content cannot deliver. That said, I'd prefer longer titles with more details. For example, you could have used "The simplest math problem no one can solve: the Collatz conjucture" where the start of the title tells what's it about for most people and mathematicians can skip it if the already know everything about the collatz conjucture. I think the thumbnail with "3x + 1" was definitely legit. And as your videos nearly always explain "why" I think it should be included in most titles. For example, I think "Why backspin basketball flies off dam? Magnus effect!" would have been more descriptive title and I would guess that this kind of QA style would work for video titles, too, similar to Quora or Stackoverflow.
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