this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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I believe its because they A-B tested his thumbnails, editors found that they vacuumed slightly more eyeballs when he was smiling, and updated the thumbnail images of him not smiling with photoshop.
The fault isn't with the photoshop though, he just doesn't have a soul so it actually looks like that when he smiles.
I'm honestly obsessed with it because it's so baffling. It takes effort to make your smile look this fake, and dedication to stick with it year after year. There's no way he hasn't been told how bad it looks, and how he could simply squint his eyes just a tad and it would look so much more natural. It's got to be a choice.
I keep hearing that stupid-face thumbnails generate more clicks and more and more people do it, and yet every single person you ask says they think it’s fucking stupid, including the creators themselves. I really wonder who these people they A-B test this with are, or if this is just some Google Autoplag Bot that estimates it’s better because it falls flat into their uncanny valley home territory.
The masses that watch his videos are not the people you'd find on Lemmy and probably not in your friend circle. They are people who click the videos on the YouTube homepage from their Smart TV and probably aren't even logged in.
They A-B test it themselves. At least some do. You can actually run multiple thumbnails on YouTube for the same video and see what does best. Linus Tech Tips also did this manually and found the face ones do better.
I've heard the theory that dumb youtube-face impresses the algorithm itself, somehow. This causes the videos to surface at a higher rate, which leads to more eyeballs (but with a layer of indirection) even though no human actually prefers it. Sort of a reverse-slop situation.