That is exactly what I said.
Then me fail English, which happens often. Sorry!
Of course every creator is going to pick a title and thumbnail that encourages people to click on the content. As I said, creators have to do this in order to even stand out to their own subscribers in a sea of content in their sub feed.
As a creator and a viewer, as long as the title and thumbnail matches the content, I'm fine with it.
Right; and I do agree, even though the current social media culture requires types of encouragement that
I really don't like. (My preferences are not in alignment with the majority, that's all.)
As an outsider, the line between encouraging and tricking is clear, but the closer you are, the fuzzier the line becomes,
especially when you do not intend to trick anyone, but think the information conveyed is useful. I know I have often crossed that line when tutoring people face-to-face; all I can say is that my intention has always been only to help, not to gain anything myself. And never to troll; to always have a meaningful, useful-to-others point.
I've had countless people throw "CLICKBAIT!" at me for just putting descriptive text in the thumbnail, and that pisses me off.
Sure; that would rile me to no end. But it is being mislabeled as someone who tricks others for their own personal gain that offends you, not the label itself, right?
Many of those people are using these words only to externalize their own confused emotions instead of trying to convey information or interact with others. Some are using words they think they know the meaning of, but really, genuinely, do not. Some are trolling, trying to evoke emotions in others to soothe their own inner turmoil, and gain some small reaction from a completely indifferent world. And because all of them involve emotions instead of logical or rational thought, they often get more traction in social media than anything actually meaningful. So, being mislabeled thus is doubly annoying/hurtful.
Point is, it is not the term or label itself, but its misuse; and especially against yourself and others who systematically denounce and detest the practice and such behaviour in general. Just look at all the videos you've made showing exactly
why the various ridiculous tech claims are bullshit.
It is ubiquitous in human societies, and excarberated in social media because of the lack of body language cues and evolved social limits and restraints in person-to-person interactions. It does not happen because people are evil; it happens because they react by emotion instead of think things through, or because they misunderstand, or because they're feeling bad and externalizing it on others. Having the label applied to yourself is difficult to deal with for a rational person; but understanding it as an action lets you see the various causes and effects, and thus deal with it, at least to some degree. I do believe countering it as an action (by pointing out the contradiction, for example, and leaving it at that) is also a useful technique (even if it gains no traction, other rational/logical people often see and understand the context, and why the label does not apply), but that gets into the sector of social behaviour where my own track record is pretty damn poor.
In the case of this thread, note that nobody referred to a video being clickbait: SiliconWizard only said that
"effective online communication is often borderline with clickbaits", referring to just that sometimes (not here) the encouragement slips into social tricks to get the clicks, even if not deliberately intended by the author, as the border is fuzzy; and that as encouragement is practically required, accidental slips will happen, so we better learn to accept and ignore any small transgressions, while still pointing out the gross deliberate attempts. All that of course referred to the correct uses of the term, with the mislabeling being a completely separate thing.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
