I started screenshotting thumbnails before I click and it totally changed how I spot fake ones
I mean this is gonna sound dumb but I started doing this thing where I screenshot a thumbnail before I even click the video, and then I look at it later without the title next to it. Last week there was this video about a guy who supposedly found a safe in a river, and the thumbnail showed stacks of cash and gold just sitting there in an open box. When I looked at just the picture by itself, with no text, it was so obviously fake, the lighting on the money didn't match the river at all and the box looked like it was pasted in. I tried this maybe 20 times over the past month and I swear 8 or 9 of them fell apart once I stripped the title away. The trick is your brain reads the headline and the picture together and fills in the gaps, so pulling them apart shows you what the image is actually claiming. The safe video turned out to be a guy opening an empty toolbox in his garage, by the way, nothing in it at all. Has anyone else tried judging a thumbnail on its own without the text, or is it just me that falls for these every time?
Screenshotting thumbnails before you click is wild but also kind of genius. You basically turned yourself into a detective for clickbait, which is hilarious because the rest of us are just out here getting played by gold stacks in a river. The part about your brain filling in the gaps between the title and the pic is real though, once you pull them apart the whole thing falls on its face. Guy opened an empty toolbox in his garage, that is a level of bait I almost have to respect. Might start doing this myself just to see how many of my favorite channels are lying to me.