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.

I'm amazed that YouTube doesn't try and do this somehow.

They do. They even give the creator statistics on which thumbnail generated more clicks (completely ignoring other factors so it's a misleading metric anyway).

There’s no active a/b testing though. The creators have to specifically change the thumbnail for everyone at once. From what I understand.
No they can a b test so some people will get one version and other people will get the other version and whichever version becomes the most popular is the version that everyone gets.