I do not understand the appeal of the "thumbnail face"; eyes wide, mouth agage, often digitally retouched until it looks lile a poor imitation of 70s genre book cover paintings (probably all done with ai these days). A mixture of "i'm about to cum" and "toes do not go in there!!!". Nothing makes me less interested in your dumb video.

I CAN understand how that might have worked initially, before everybody was doing it. Like a scuff on a white pair of shoes but now that everybody is doing it, it really doesn't stick out anymore. like pissing in an ocean of piss where all the different shades have blended together into a homogeneous orange soup.

I brought it up one time on an unrelated subreddit and I got like 5 replies withit about 10 minutes of people repeating, almost verbatim, how Linus TechTips said it was dumb but he does it because those videos get more views. It felt like I was the target of an underfunded propaganda campaign or automated bot brigade.

This is such a bizarre thing to me. The whole thing, the trend, the alleged appeal and the weirdo cult from some awful youtuber that showed up to learn me. I feel like the youtube thing is morphing into a cia funded study of psychological manipulation. Like, we're well passed using special fonts and colors to attract attention and have slipped into some kind of glitch exploit of the human psyche. The brain version of running backwards up the steps in Mario 64. thumbnail face and slime videos and gross asmr videos of women reviewing Hostess lunch cakes and RANDOM capitalization of WORDS in titles. Little manipulations of the structural quirks of the subconscious that are far enough beneath the surface that it isn't obvious what's going on.