Whenever I see a youtube link being posted, I rarely take the effort of clicking on it. Same for external links.
On Hacker News, I usually read comments first to see if clicking the link is worth it.
I wonder if adding an (optional) entry for the "link" option when clicking the "post" button would be a way to engage the reader to click on the link or video.
One such optional entry could be:
- few words of context
- summary of the video
- quote from the text
- etc
Of course, this can also be done as a comment after posting the link, but not many people do this.