Clickbait Remover for Youtube (Chrome)

For a few years now, there has been a visible change in how YouTubers design video thumbnails and write titles. The goal is now to make their clips stand out as much as possible in order to increase the visibility of their content in YouTube search results and suggestions.

If you're one of the many viewers who are unhappy with this development, Clickbait Remover for Youtube was designed for you. It's a Chrome extension, also available for Firefox, that replaces clickbait thumbnails with stills from videos and reformats titles in order to get rid of annoying words written in ALL CAPS.

With this extension installed, the thumbnails designed by content creators will no longer be visible. Instead, they will be replaced by a still frame selected from the video itself, either from the start, middle or end of the video.

Given that many YouTubers create colorful thumbnails and often make silly faces to try to draw as much attention as possible, it is understandable why you would not want to see them. However, to me, YouTube seems quite bland without them.

While not everyone hates clickbaity thumbnails, no one wants to see a title written in all caps. This extension can either convert the entire thing to lowercase or leave only the first letter capitalized.

One issue I came across when trying out this feature is that certain elements in the title are often supposed to be capitalized and look strange in lowercase. Acronyms, in particular, are much more difficult to read, and titles sometimes include other words that should have their first letter capitalized.

Some of us don't particularly mind this recent trend in thumbnail design on YouTube, but there is no denying that some content creators take things a bit too far. Clickbait Remover for Youtube does an excellent job of dealing with these flashy thumbnails, but video titles are probably better left as they are in my opinion.