DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27520080

Okay, Biden isn’t popular. But his policies sure are. - Divisions by zero

> President Biden’s policy agenda is incredibly popular, much more popular than his opponent’s. But Biden the man? Not so much. > The question now is whom to blame for the approval gap between the president and his agenda: voters, the media or Biden himself. > Democrats have long argued that their policies are more popular than those of Republicans. In a recent blind test conducted by YouGov, that was unmistakably true. The polling organization asked Americans what they thought about major policies proposed by Biden and Donald Trump without specifying who proposed them. The idea was to see how the public perceived ideas when stripped of tribal associations. > Biden’s agenda was the winner, hands down. > Of the 28 Biden proposals YouGov asked about, 27 were supported by more people than opposed them. Impressively, 24 received support from more than 50 percent of respondents.

When you browse Netflix, they use different thumbnails for the movies depending on the profile they’ve made for you. Even if it’s as blatant as “white person from the movie”/“black person from the movie”. If you ignore a movie for long enough, sometimes they even swap it out for a different image to trick you into watching it.

I’m amazed that YouTube doesn’t try and do this somehow. Instead, every video somehow has the same stupid thumbnails of arrows, meaningless text and gormless faces, and I hate it.

But then I block all ads anyway, so it may be that they’re actively trying to make me go away.

They do exactly this. You’ve never seen the same video appear twice, and the second time it has a different title and thumbnail? That’s how they figured out how effective clickbait is.
YouTube let’s creators A/B test different thumbnails, but they can’t upload a bunch of them to feed to different demographics or automatically cycle them like Netflix does. I’m sure that’s coming though.
To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”, it’s just an option available for channel owners to set alternative thumbnails and then check which does better.

To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”

I thought it was pretty clear that “they” = YouTube…

It’s not YouTube though, it’s the YouTuber
The YouTuber can’t do it without YouTube making it available