YouTube's experiment which changes custom thumbnails has angered content creators

Social media giants do run hundreds of tests in the background and keep trying out new features. But an on-going test being conducted by YouTube has not gone down too well with its content creators. That's because this test is making changes to the custom thumbnails made by creators, without their consent.[caption id="attachment_4629131" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

YouTube logo illustration.[/caption]YouTuber Rayo Alarcon Gareca, noticed that the thumbnails used on his videos were changed randomly. On tweeting about it, Team YouTube handle responded saying that YouTube was conducting a small experiment where 0.3 percent of the viewers would see auto-generated thumbnails.

This response clearly seems to have ruffled some feathers and likely so, because YouTube isn't informing or taking consent of the content creators before changing the thumbnails. While YouTube says that this experiment does not take away from your ability to create custom thumbnails, changing them even for experimental purposes is just wrong.A thumbnail is a showcase of what the video is about, and a lot of content creators take great pains to make them and ensure they attract the right audience. YouTube running an experiment to create aut0-generated thumbnails to gain insights, at the cost of the creator's channel, is just unethical. A post on the YouTube forum informing about it without giving any heads up to the channels affected has not gone down too well with a lot of YouTubers.YouTube influencers took to their Twitter handles to express their displeasure at this.Some Twitter commentators tried to find some humour in this whole thing as well