 One time, when I was in middle school, I was offered a spot in an exclusive club of cool kids, but I turned them down. I know better than to mess with clickbait like that. If you've ever been to this... youtube.com? You may have seen this handsome devil smiling at you on the front page. This is Derek Muller, and his PopSci Education channel Veritasium is a phenomenal success. Over a billion views. 11 million subscribers. One and a half million dollars per year just from youtube before the paid sponsors. In one of his recent videos, titled Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective, Derek shows how A.B. testing his videos, titles, and thumbnails really boosts his view counts. He also argues at length that, despite what some critics might think, this sort of deliberate optimization for views is a good thing. So long as there's nothing untruthful about the title, nothing that misleads someone into expecting one sort of content and getting something else, how can we possibly hope to separate clickbait from good, engaging writing? Isn't the whole category of clickbait just a fuzzily defined matter of personal taste? Derek's speculation about the nature and propriety of clickbait is part of a long philosophical dialogue on journalistic ethics. People have struggled for millennia to figure out what principles underpin the moral character of media like Veritasium. Artistic works intended to inform or educate the viewer. It's an important subject to wrestle with. Understanding what sorts of things separate diligent reporting from misleading gossip can help us to feel out how much stock we can put in a given piece of media and how to contextualize the goals of its author. If you pick up a copy of The Sun at your local supermarket and expect to be educated or enlightened, you're going to have about as bad a time as you'd have opening up a Wikipedia page on bounded operators expecting some light entertainment. The journalistic ethics of clickbait run up against issues those philosophers have raised about sensationalism, what Maria Grave et al. define as a form of media where production style overpowers substantive information. The term sensationalist only acquired the sort of negative vibe it currently holds around the time of yellow journalism where newspaper giants Joseph Pulitzer and William Hertz battled for dominion over the New York City news industry by using every dirty trick they could think of to sell more papers than the other guy and, hopefully, put them out of business. Big colorful pictures, hyperbolic language, overreporting on crime and scandal, overblown scare headlines and huge font. The dueling newspapers descended rapidly into a full-out assault on the senses, sensationalist. A large part of why sensationalism is seen as distasteful is because it undermines the value of a medium by trading away its unique substance for homogenous attention-grabbing style. We buy newspapers because of their distinctive character. We want to know with some amount of accuracy and emotional distance what's actually going on in the world. We don't buy newspapers because we want to hear wild speculation or thrilling storytelling that gets our blood racing the way that we might with other sensational media like action movies or spy novels. Of course, people will still consume sensationalist news. It's not like yellow journalism was bad for business, but it did erode what the public expected from newspapers, diligently training them that big scary attention-grabbing headlines might be something they'll care about, or maybe not. As the New York world and the New York Journal went to greater and greater lengths to outdo each other in that arena, they lost their distinctive desirable news-like character and became just like any other media that exists solely to appeal to the most reliable sources of human attention- bright colors, fear, shock, and awe. The conditions that led to yellow journalism are more or less the same conditions that produce clickbait, brutal competition for a limited reserve of audience attention. YouTube's mysterious algorithm is opaque. Nobody knows exactly how it works, but we can be sure it's ruthlessly optimizing to capture as much of your moment-to-moment awareness as it possibly can in order to show you the greatest number of ads. In that environment, every YouTuber is pitted against every other YouTuber in a massive Pulitzer-Hertz cage match, where failing to appease that algorithm can mean disaster. If your description and thumbnail are just slightly less eye-catching than the ones on either side of them, that could be the difference between a six-figure income and being suddenly relegated to the darkest corner of the YouTube let, forgotten forever. As with yellow journalism, there's a long-term cost to this single-minded pursuit of attention. As the nonsensational creators are eliminated by the algorithm and replaced by shocked face, red arrow, one weird trick attention hogs, the landscape loses its varied and distinctive character and becomes saturated with pure spectacle, and it gets harder and harder to find a reliable signal that any given video is interesting or important in the noise. Take this video, for example. What's it about, do you think? It's actually a history of analog computation devices, a fascinating subject that I'm really interested in. Unfortunately, there's no real way to determine that's what it's about from either the title or the thumbnail. I might be able to recognize this particular mechanism or guess that it might be an analog computer, but other than that, I'm sort of left in the dark. The most powerful computers you've never heard of could be referring to just about anything. Is it talking about, like, esoteric supercomputers, optical computers? Who can say? I'm sure if the video was titled something boring, like a brief history of analog computation, it wouldn't have 5.6 million views, but it would convey what the video is actually about, and I, a person interested in analog computation, might have watched it, but it's not about accurately representing the content. It's about commanding attention. This might sound like a critique of creators who decide to lean into clickbaity titles. We tend to focus a lot on individual choices, because they work on a scale that's very easy to understand. You make choices every day. But Yellow Journalism newspapers didn't spiral into sensationalism, because all the writers and editors and artists and everyone involved was actively deciding to erode the unique character of news in favor of homogenous spectacle. It happened because of the persistent, systemic pressure of competition for attention. The YouTube algorithm wouldn't care one bit if a clickbaity creator suddenly had a change of heart and started tiling videos to accurately convey their content, rather than optimizing to get them on the front page. They would simply be replaced with another, more attention-friendly creator, and the process would continue with them instead. A creator's decision, one way or the other, wouldn't affect the direction of that ratchet. It only changes which individuals benefit. Printed news was rescued from the Yellow Journalism race to the bottom by a number of factors. A shift in the legal conception of privacy and libel. A well-funded competitor who could offer something more credible and less sensational for those who wanted to escape the battle of spectacle. The united backlash from journalists against the devaluation of their profession. All these elements changed the slope of the landscape away from the pure attention game and allowed newspapers to flourish based on other criteria. Instead of doubling down on sensationalism as a desirable direction for YouTube, maybe we should look for similar ways to change the incentives that force us to make concessions in substantive information in favor of style. Do sensationalism and clickbait erode the overall quality of the medium of YouTube? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop talking.