cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19421887
DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.
“Clickbait” isn’t the exception anymore, it’s becoming the norm. Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.
It’s no one’s fault. It’s a system that creates a race to the bottom.
DeArrow hopes to stop this cycle. It’s time to return to a more peaceful experience.
I loved the idea of this extension and used it for a few months, but ended up disabling it because it made YouTube take significantly longer to load a page on my daily laptop, which admittedly is pretty old.
I’ve been using this for a while now and the only thing I’ll say is that a lot of videos don’t have alternative titles, so since it’s all crowd sourced I feel that the best solution is to have more people using it.
Brilliant idea regardless.
Love it. While not all titles get replaced (crowd sourced) just the fact that the thumbnails get normalized is enough for it to be worth it.
Now that’s something interesting. Does it work with piped?
Not sure, but other alternatives do embrace it. I use FreeTube, and it has a built in function to use DeArrow. I’m loving it so far.
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.
I used this within smart tube for a while, but honestly I kind of missed some of the clockbait titles. There problem I faced was that it wasn’t clear when a title had been replaced or not, so when you did find a video with a relatively clockbait titles, it gave you a bit of a false sense of security. I also found that sometimes the crowd sourced titles were just boring, albeit accurate.
Maybe I’m just weird or maybe I’ve just been browsing YouTube for so long that I’m used to it, but for now it’s an addon I’ll skip, though I’m very glad it exists.
I also found that sometimes the crowd sourced titles were just boring, albeit accurate.
It’s the equivalent of the comedy geniuses that remove words from comics thinking it’s always better.
I turn it off and on to see which changed. An indicator would be nice. Maybe an icon that I can hover over to reveal the original thumbnail and title.
I get where you are coming from. If I follow a channel then I already get a feel of what the content will be even if the title or/thumbnail is clickbait. Also you lose part of the channel’s charm. Exaggerations can be really funny.
It works a lot better for the trending section for unknown channels.
The icon and hover to reveal previous title has been available in the extension for a long while.
Sorry. I was using it with Freetube, not the extension.
Thank you for pointing that out.
This is genuinely amazing. Thanks!!
Hmm I wasn’t aware it “fixes” titles as well… I am using it on Smart Tube to have better thumbnails, do I have to activate this myself to correct titles as well?
Anyway 99% of my ST usage (aside watching videos, as in, adding stuff to watch later) comes from my Shield TV home screen, I add stuff there to “My List” Shield row based on my recommendations row… And I am pretty sure DeArrow does not work there, only within the app :/
Default part of the Piped interface, BTW, along with Sponsorblock.
A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube
It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.
It doesn’t change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.
I haven’t used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.
De arrow also lets you do those things and customize which of them it always does.
It’s also the same guy that does sponsor block :)
Not trying to steer people away from yours, it’s good to have alternatives, just sharing the info
i love dearrow more than i love sponsorblock and ublock tbh <3
Yes, amazing extension in combination with what you said. I actually find myself watching a lot less videos on YouTube. This is because even knowing something is click bait, I still impulse click on it. Also, it has renewed my love for info YouTube channels because i realized that I prefer watching those, but usually they are not click baity and I used to skip them before DeArrow.
Also, highly recommend this extension combo if you have kids who consume YouTube
When you browse Netflix, they use different thumbnails for the movies depending on the profile they’ve made for you. Even if it’s as blatant as “white person from the movie”/“black person from the movie”. If you ignore a movie for long enough, sometimes they even swap it out for a different image to trick you into watching it.
I’m amazed that YouTube doesn’t try and do this somehow. Instead, every video somehow has the same stupid thumbnails of arrows, meaningless text and gormless faces, and I hate it.
But then I block all ads anyway, so it may be that they’re actively trying to make me go away.
deleted by creator
YouTube let’s creators A/B test different thumbnails, but they can’t upload a bunch of them to feed to different demographics or automatically cycle them like Netflix does. I’m sure that’s coming though.
To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”, it’s just an option available for channel owners to set alternative thumbnails and then check which does better. I don’t think YouTube does this by itself if the uploader doesn’t enable it
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I’m amazed that YouTube doesn’t try and do this somehow.
They do. They even give the creator statistics on which thumbnail generated more clicks (completely ignoring other factors so it’s a misleading metric anyway).
There’s no active a/b testing though. The creators have to specifically change the thumbnail for everyone at once. From what I understand.
No they can a b test so some people will get one version and other people will get the other version and whichever version becomes the most popular is the version that everyone gets.
Ah cool
That example, losing the artwork of the Kurzgesagt videos is pretty bad though.
Is it? The original artwork was fairly clickbaity imo.
This is my biggest challenge with this extension. What’s clickbait to one person is not to another. Several times I’ve come across titles that get mangled when rewritten to lose key points. Or the image gets replaced with a random screen grab. There’s a difference between somebody doing the YouTube face and a title with “the craziest stunt you’ve ever seen” and an artist photo with a title saying the “a crazy stunt jump through a burning hoop”. I’m okay with the latter but dearrow will often remove crazy. The is just an contrived example
One person could still say “crazy” makes it clickbait, but having some adjectives are fine
It replaces it with the much more pleasing artwork from the actual video. Someone has gone through and picked nice frames for many of those videos.
You can whitelist channels to not replace their thumbnails.
It’s no one’s fault. It’s a system that creates a race to the bottom.
Hard disagree. It’s everyone’s fault who actually supports the practice in some form or another.
DeArrow hopes to stop this cycle. It’s time to return to a more peaceful experience.
It would just “hide” the clickbait, which would cause people who block clickbait, to suddenly click on clickbait, further supporting the clickbait norm through additional clicks that weren’t there before.
I like the concept and generally it works well, unfortunately I’ve had to disable it because of how sluggish it can make a lot of pages feel. The playlist view in particular becomes hard to use when the extension is enabled.
Hopefully they fix stuff like that longer term so I can turn it back on.
