I know you’ve seen it

You’re probably familiar with “Youtube Face”, the somewhat annoying algorithm “hack” wherein people pretend to be shocked for a thumbnail in order to make their video trend. There’s lots of writing on this and the Reddit thread below has pretty good discussion:

• https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-going-to-sell/
• https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-youtube-face
• https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/13qfbdu/why_do_you_do_those_stupid_faces_in_your/

It can be dissapointing in particular when someone with actually good content like feels compelled to make this so their video trends:

The trend actually seems to have died down from a few years back, in that this used to represent every single thumbnail but today I had to scroll my feed for a moment before I found a random example to paste. In fact I’m going to thank Mr Beast for apparently starting the death of it: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861576/youtube-face-mrbeast-open-closed-mouth-a-b-testing-thumbnail

On Meta

I was hanging out at the gym without headpphones so I wanted to doomscroll something without sound. I opened Facebook and after ignoring my daily White House sponsored posts I came across this:

This stood out for a couple of reasons. Firstly because it referenced the greatest animated movie of the year, but also because it showed a trend I’ve been seeing for a while: This “circular picture in picture” that conveys nothing new, and is often a picture of the same person we’re already looking at. It’s totally out of place but as far as I can see, it’s functioning as some sort of SEO hack. Because one example is not a “trend”, I scrolled past the recruitment ad for ICE and looked at the next image.

This is not, as far as I can tell, the same social media company. We went from an anime focused group to the New York Post, and here I’m seeing Gene Simmons from a slightly different angle using the same “circular picture in picture” format. I’m sure I’m not the only one querying why we get to see the same person again.

If you want trash, the Daily Mail has you covered. Using the same format again.

After scrolling through some voting advertisements for US republicans (Americans: your tax payer dollars really are being pissed away on a marketing team that don’t know how to scope advertisements to a relevant country) we find another example.

I don’t know who “News Local” is actually local to but they’ve jumped on board also.

And is there any better definition of “clickbait” than a group calling themselves “Worth Sharing” ?

Now for something I actually clicked

And now get us away from this nonse, I’ll just leave you with the one image I actually clicked.