It would be great if their algorithm picked a thumbnail that reflected the entire video, not just a few frames specifically chosen to game people's compulsive clicking.
Also, partnered accounts are allowed to upload custom thumbnails (which can be any image, not necessarily even a screenshot from the video).
On the basis of the type if video I'd discounted manual intervention. Though if people can just upload any image I'm now surprised that they're not all like this.
Can you pick an arbitrary video frame, or only one of the suggested thumbnails?
If someone wants to game the thumbnails, then they will just manually select the thumbnail to use; and there are to many legitimate use cases for this ability for Youtube to remove it.
Many channels I watch carefully select an iconic frame from the video to serve as the thumbnail, or construct an artificial thumbnail that provides useful information about the type and subject of the video. Manual will frequently produce better results than automatic for a good-quality channel.
You wouldn't want to require 100%, as many people stop when a video starts rolling credits, or when it switches to a screen using annotations to link to other videos. But 50-75% would work well as a threshold to count "views".
The ones with misleading titles/thumbnails often have far more down-votes than up-votes yet YouTube continues to show those as the highest recommended/relevant (I guess Google prefers click-throughs over user-satisfaction).
Their insight is that not only are there images that are "high-quality", but also images that are positive. Positive images get more clicks, over just a decent image. I wonder if that information is encoded in the RNN in some way.
(This is where I'd normally rant about RNNs and other ML techniques hiding this information from their creators by locking it up inside the black box, but I'll save that for another day.)
Are people re-watching a small segment of the video? Try classifying individual frames from that segment or just before. Of course, those are often action moments that result in smeared motion and artifacts and may not result in a quality thumbnail.
These ideas also only come into play when a video has been live for a while, after the uploader has initially picked a thumbnail. Maybe a "We have some new thumbnail suggestions for you, take a look" alert or message?
I click on the low detail inline images, and they stay the same disappointing size and reveal no further detail.
They're all, like 600px X 200px? Am I being greedy for want of gigantic images, upwards of 3000px wide?
I suppose it is an article about thumbnails, after all, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.
(I agree that'd be cool.)
edit: constructively put - there's simpler stuff to fix UX and match user patterns still isn't there?
For example: why should you spend time working on the playlist playback when youtube could instead spend time working on automatic categorization, content creators have to manually create playlists, even if they sequentially number their videos. Youtube shouldn't waste their time on playlist editing when it could be doing the right thing automatically.
