Naomi Brockwell makes it easy and interesting to learn about how our personal lives are being spied on by potentially anybody. Share it with your friends and family so maybe one day every country won’t have a social credit score or other dystopian outcomes.
I have heard multiple different creators say a similar thing - they don’t want to but it works and not doing it hurts the views they get. And there are lots of creators out there basically doing A/B testing on them to see what things preform better - and this is what we are left with.
It is sad that meaningful titles at least have gone as it makes it much harder to actually search for things. Thumbnails I care less about.
Sadly I think it works because people click on them. Or are more likely to. Most people seem to just be more likely to click on the flashy simple click baity titles and thumbnails. Those that don’t, I suspect, are in the small minority. Though I think at least some of this is due to them pushing algorithmic content over anything else so hard.