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> "Now there seems to be a paradox when it comes to clickbait. People almost universally claim to hate it, but you also see it everywhere."

His paradox of clickbait is very... interesting. I propose a similar paradox of used car salesmen: People say they hate it when used car salesmen lie to them, yet used car salesmen who lie the most sell the most cars!




Used car salesmen is all about information imbalances.

Daniel Pink describes this in detail in to "Sell is Human" Here's a short summary. https://fourminutebooks.com/to-sell-is-human-summary/


I think the more people we educate on critical thinking, the less effective click bait will be.

Today though, if a used car salesman has some truly great cars that people really need but nobody buys them because Donald down the street is pulling people in to buy lemons with bald faced lies...well, that's sort of the conundrum we find ourselves in, isn't it?


The core issue isn't education, but that as a user you have little to no control over the recommendation system and the rest of the Youtube experience. So even if you hate clickbait and want to get rid of it, there is nothing that you can do to make it disappear from your Youtube. Google fully controls what you get to see and they don't care if you feel happy or educated from watching videos, they only care that you keep watching so that they can show you ads.

To have any hope of fixing this we'd need to separate the curation of content from the hosting of content.




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