Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

While I agree with your hesitation in marketing deceptive content, I think you may be overloading marketing on YouTube with the term click-bait.

From Wikipedia:

> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.

Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.

HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: