Faced Down

There is a phenomenon known as "YouTube face." Put simply, it's when a video maker places a picture of themselves with an exaggerated facial expression into the thumbnail for their YouTube video (although I suppose it could be for any similar service). The idea is that people are more likely to click on a video where someone's making a weird face, even when the facial expression seems completely divorced from the content.

Some fairly mild examples of the phenomenon.

It occurred to me while reading an online comment thread that was something of a debate over whether or not the average member of the public had any real agency. On one side was a set of people who were basically saying "rather than complain, do something," and the other side responded with "we have no power, and can't change anything."

And that's when YouTube face popped into my head. Because this phenomenon isn't something that was dictated to people... there wasn't a YouTube executive who announced one day that everyone had to do this. In an article on the trend from 2018, when it was already well entrenched, Joe Veix noted:

At some point, a user discovered that a catchy preview image tended to trigger potential viewers’ curiosity enough that they clicked through more frequently.

That anonymous user started a trend that has persisted for years. Sure, the YouTube algorithms have something to do with it. But so do video makers and their audiences. One person started something that changed much of the face of video. And enough people followed them that the change persists. Sure, it doesn't work for everyone. I've seen people try it for a time, and then give up. But they tried it. Because they understood its potential.

I've chatted with a few people about this, and they tend to downplay it, in the big picture. And the reason for that, I think, is that it's not predictable. The person who first tried it didn't know that it was going to be huge. (Otherwise, I suspect they would have gone after a trademark on it.) But I think that a lot of things work this way... it's just that the failures fade into obscurity. Survivorship bias in action.

But there are a lot of trends that work this way. Take short-form video content, which is (was?) TikTok's stock in trade. There's nothing magical about videos under a minute long. People tried it, and other people liked it, so it worked.

Serendipity, however, is different from intent. And I think that people don't really believe in the idea of a deliberate bottom-up movement genuinely being successful. And sure, nothing would stay bottom-up forever; there are always opportunists who would rush to position themselves as leaders of the parade, and seek to make themselves wealthy (or more wealthy) by attempting to sell access to, or the attention of, the group's members.

That's something that can be dealt with. The bigger problem is one of coordinated collective action, when people actually have expectations of the outcomes of those actions. Occupy Wall Street didn't fail because it couldn't muster people to it's cause. I went down to the Seattle branch of the movement, and there were a lot of people there. Occupy Wall Street fizzled because once the street protests didn't bring about sweeping social change over the span of a few months, everyone just dropped it and went home. But that many people could have moved markets. And once they'd started doing so, the alleged "powers that be" would have been forced to pay attention.

In any event, I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that one person can't change the world. I think that it simply takes a different approach, and a different attitude, than people normally bring to the project.