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Fighting with YouTube to show a preview image

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Re: Fighting with YouTube to show a preview image

#21

Post by extraduder_ire »

snailmailman wrote: post #20
mcphage wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d probably want it to match YouTube’s preview image, so if your reader sees the video on YouTube proper at a later date, they’ll recognize it. I’m not sure of a good way to do that, since it’s not necessarily a screengrab from the middle of the video.

I don’t know how possible that is anymore. Youtube is letting creators A/B test thumbnails and titles now. So the thumbnail and title isn’t consistent between users or page visits. It’s tripped me up several times. Although it’s unclear how much it’s the new feature or creators manually trying to game the algorithm by shuffling the title and thumbnail around.

I believe it's consistent per user (account or logged out) while the test is ongoing then switches to the "winning" thumbnail for everyone once it concludes. Tests can be re-run as many times as you want though.

Re: Fighting with YouTube to show a preview image

#22

Post by yenjay »

Have you seen the oEmbed format: https://abdus.dev/posts/youtube-oembed/ ?

I was really happy when I discovered it when I was researching how Wagtail CMS implements the embedded content previews.

For your example it returns:

  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bJ7mTY9501c/hqdefault.jpg",
The file is smaller but shows up correctly!

Re: Fighting with YouTube to show a preview image

#23

Post by cubefox »

realusername wrote: post #19
cubefox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of another YouTube embarrassment: Some ten years ago, Facebook added a "translate" button to every comment. The translations were pretty bad (they used Bing Translate rather than the much better Google Translate), but it was really useful to understand people from all over the world. You would think YouTube (owned by Google) would in short order also add such a button to comments. Haha, no. They didn'…

Even right now the translate button on YouTube is still broken, it doesn't depend of the languages of your account but on an inaccessible list somewhere. You can have your translate button language different than your account language. (Which is the case for my account)

I think it has to do with the fact that YouTube basically never had serious competitors except in the very early days. The only semi-competition is now TikTok, which they copied with YouTube Shorts. But their regular video business has been completely unchallenged for 15 years. In an environment without competition, efficiency and effectiveness of internal decision making can easily degrade over time.

Re: Fighting with YouTube to show a preview image

#24

Post by xp84 »

cubefox wrote: post #23
realusername wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even right now the translate button on YouTube is still broken, it doesn't depend of the languages of your account but on an inaccessible list somewhere. You can have your translate button language different than your account language. (Which is the case for my account)

I think it has to do with the fact that YouTube basically never had serious competitors except in the very early days. The only semi-competition is now TikTok, which they copied with YouTube Shorts. But their regular video business has been completely unchallenged for 15 years. In an environment without competition, efficiency and effectiveness of internal decision making can easily degrade over time.

Yep and that also explains why YouTube's comments section is the biggest dumpster fire of outright scams I've ever seen: why would they care?
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