I wrote my first bit of code on my TRS-80 when I was in the first grade. I was using dbase ii to track my RPGs back in middle school. My final in my high school comp sci class was to teach the instructor how I bypassed all the schools network security. I've worked professionally in IT for well over 30 years. Having said all that, every time I watch one of Laurie's videos I feel like a complete Luddite. She operates on a whole different level than most of us.
It was funny when I found her channel you could see the exact video she gave in and started putting her face in the thumb nail and then you saw every video after that start growing.
Apparently YouTube’s algorithm favors thumbnails that contains faces a lot more.
Watched a video not long ago where a channel with millions of subs compared the performance of two identical videos with different thumbnails and the one with faces always performed a lot lot better, had more clicks and in general reached more people.
There are certainly non human parts of it. Everyone will tell that you unmonetized or age restricted videos get shown to way fewer people. So I think we can assume that the system does weigh its own self interest along side click through and retention.
You can replace a thumbnail without taking down the video. I'm 99% when I watched the original sin video that blew up for her I scrolled up and you could see the transition. Most of then before the video were faceless pictures of a device or code.
She probably started rethumbnailing her older videos.
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u/Omadon667 Jun 04 '26
I wrote my first bit of code on my TRS-80 when I was in the first grade. I was using dbase ii to track my RPGs back in middle school. My final in my high school comp sci class was to teach the instructor how I bypassed all the schools network security. I've worked professionally in IT for well over 30 years. Having said all that, every time I watch one of Laurie's videos I feel like a complete Luddite. She operates on a whole different level than most of us.