Tom Scott did an episode where he explained that going back and retrofitting old videos with the shock face and click bait titles upped his views by a lot
I do not really like them either but I am not sure what point you are making. Their point is that these images result in more viewers, even accounting for your absence. What are we meant to do with the information that you are out?
And they explained why this opinion is kind of silly.
“I will not listen to anything this person has to say, because I don’t like a small and inconsequential part of their presentation” is not a great opinion to begin with, even ignoring the fact that this presentation might be necessary to reach a meaningful audience.
And around 70% of titles are replaced by DeArrow for me, and of the other 30% around 80% are probably just too unknown. So in total just 6% are actually not clickbait, and those 6% are basically just dashcam channels with the numbering as title, the largest german channel about Lego-style bricks and media.ccc.de
That being said, I set a “Don’t recommend channel” on Brodie Robertson because he took part in harassing a developer about some barely nsfw furry art being hidden in some software but refuses to block Nazis from his mastodon profile. It seemed like a double standard that demonstrated tolerance for said Nazis.
Its trickier to piece together what happened now but if you search “thorium browser furry”, you’ll probably find a few posts about it. There was a hell of a lot of misinfo including about it being CP for some reason when iirc it was just an anthropomorphic dog with the camera facing upwards towards them wearing panties or something like that.
So I did some digging, and it actually goes a little deeper than just a furry image. There was some anti-circumcision stuff on the developers site it seems, not in the browser itself. Apparently they weren’t even linked. They were all removed with a single commit. I took a look on the commit history, and there were some pictures of circumcised penises. Including some extremely botched ones, some belonging to babies. I didn’t take a look at all of them, but once I did are hardly labelable as CP. If anything, they’re educational content. Wikipedia contains some similar pictures as well, you can’t label Wikipedia as a CP website for those either, can you? They were running a campaign against circumcision, as one should. It’s unethical genital mutilation (speaking as someone who was circumcised). Labeling this anti-circumcision stuff as CP is really stupid imo. Fuck circumcision. And imo harassing someone for this is even worse than sneaking a furry pic in a browser.
Don’t only blame the algorithm. The users are to blame as well. People tend to click on these thumbnails more. It’s a clickbait technique and it works.
Check out Technology Connections. Very successful channel. Not a single clickbaity face in sight. It has the bold text, sure, but it mostly describes the actual video.
I do the same. I don’t care if there is an algorithm or not, I don’t care if you get 0,00001% more money. The end doesn’t justify the means. I am on a personal vendetta, every time I am on YT and I see a thumbnail like that or one with clickbait text or arrows. It’s instant don’t recommend channel. I don’t care if I am subbed to that channel or not. Stop finding excuses, we need a gram of human decency, stop whoring yourself like that
I’m subscribed to his channel for years and in my opinion its the best Linux content on YouTube. And its the first time I see this face as a thumbnail, but to be honest, the had a few strange ones too. If I were not subscribed to his channel and would not know that he makes good content, then I would probably come to the same conclusion to not watch the video based off the thumbnail. I sometimes refuse to click a video based on the title too!
But I don’t know what it is, but this content from him is the worst in years (in my opinion)! So the thumbnail fits nicely and you don’t need to see it anyway. It’s not worth watching it. But I’m serious when I say that you should check out his other videos, if you look for Linux content. He does often amazing job of history stuff too, and content that others don’t report on.
I have astigmatism, so I can’t work with dark themes. I can’t read correctly when everything is black around. For me, the perfect theme is the one that has a black window manager, gray variations on specific widgets, and white windows (the background desktop image I prefer it to be blue-ish). Basically, to work properly, I need a mostly light, but mixed environment that provides contrast. Not all white, and definitely not all black. So far, I haven’t found such a theme, because no GUI environment allows for such specificity in theming for the various widgets. Although the default Gnome theme ain’t too bad.
I use a Medium theme on my desktop. It's not dark or light. It really works for me.
I found it here, https://github.com/blue-mood/blue-mood-kde-color-scheme
I was actually looking for a Med-Dark charcoal theme and decided to try this first. I've used it for years now.
To be honest, this seems to me like a pretty bad take with weird and kind of BS arguments. Why are professional designer, both those working for some of the biggest tech companies and those working in open source project, making these choices? It couldn’t be for actual reasons or because they actually prefer it like that. No, they are “afraid of color”. Or implying that dark theme exist because of these black on white themes, as a mean to escape it. It just weird backwards logic to justify his taste and shouldn’t be necessary to just state that he prefer a different kind of themes.
To me, the Windows themes he showed as positive examples look way to cluttered and busy, even though they don’t show this much information. I don’t need the theme to be “exiting”, I need them to display the information in an easily readable way. And dark theme aren’t there just for people who dislike the modern light theme. Having a light and a dark theme (and ideally having the app follow your system preference) actually serves a purpose. You can actively switch between them depending on the context, the time of day, the brightness of the room or any other reason to make the screen easily readable and comfortable to look at.
Black on white doesn’t have this issue because all the white around it does is slightly blur into the black text and makes it a little grey at worst.
Any dark theme for a longer period of time also causes the white text to burn in my retina for a couple minutes, and I just see lines when I look away, and also makes reading a long article difficult and painful.
Dark themes look so much better, but keep in mind some people have very good reasons to prefer light themes. There’s no need for dark theme elitism.
If you are on Android, repainter can be really nice to find an accessible background/foreground combo using the new Material You theme engine. I get the impression it wasn’t designed for that purpose but it does the job if you try to use mostly Material You apps.
I’m certainly not that bad, but I see where you are coming from. I like a very light grey text on a medium to dark background for this reason that white text on black ‘shadows’
The point of the video is that current default themes (particularly light themes) are too high contrast and too monochromatic. And in that scenario, a dark theme becomes a necessity because a high contrast dark theme is usually better received than a white one.
I like light themes and agree that they can be done well. Overall my problem with dark themes is they are too low contrast everything melts into everything else. Who doesn’t want a distinct border around a window?
I was a light theme user for very long time, until a few years ago I met Vim with the theme gruvbox (dark). Check out gruvbox, it’s my favorite theme of all time. Often there are multiple variants from it, with slight difference in contrast and coloring. For long text reading I prefer black on white, but nowadays I use dark themes for operating system and many other stuff. Especially for programming / scripting its much more readable as dark theme, for whatever reason.
I’m still conflicted, because most dark themes suck, but most light themes are acceptable. Have a look here, gruvbox has a light theme and dark theme: github.com/morhetz/gruvbox
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