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.
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The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.
No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.
Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.
I agree. I think what you describe is also seen in sponsor block.
People mark story telling videos mostly as filler content, so a beautiful 10 minute video is chopped down to only a minute or two and most of what makes the video great is removed.
Live music sets where people segment out the intro and outro to songs, so tracks are mashed together for a non-stop music experience, which I think misses the mark with live music.
I also find a lot of sponsor segments are done quite badly like the person who made them doesn’t care or is in a rush. Eg. Today I came a sponsor segment that started 11 seconds too early. I only recognised it because it kicked in half way through a sentence.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use the extension; I’ve just disabled most of the auto actions.
Many moons ago I tried Darrow for a day and got the same feeling as what your described. I decided the original video titles are superior and disabled the extension.
yeah, I’ve got it set to off by default. i used it almost like a spoiler tag. click the button to see the answer to “THIS AMAZING DEVICE DOES WHAT???”
Yeah, it’s possible that wasn’t an option back when I used it. I remember thinking that some sort of default off would be better. At the time I think it was either on by default and toggleable - I always toggled it - or it was just disabled and unwieldy to enable.
Edit: actually even better would be to have a short community written summary that could be more descriptive. Just like a popup or something. I don’t need the title to disappear, just know if the video is worth my time.
ooh yeah, a good tooltip on mouseover would be perfect.
there is quite a bit of granularity to the options these days if you haven’t tried it in a bit. I was able to make it work more or less exactly how i wanted.
Oh cool, I might give it another look.
I respectfully disagree. Any high quality creator is tangibly penalized by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm for not optimizing their titles and thumbnails. A rare few choose to take this penalty but I don’t blame the many quality creators who choose to take part in the game that YouTube has made for everyone.
Yes, the alternate titles may not be perfect, but I’d take any random person’s attempt at a title over the hyper optimized ones any day because I’d rather make an informed decision to watch something even if there is some degree of inaccuracy than to make a completely uninformed decision based on what an algorithm predicted would most likely get me to click and get hooked on a video irregardless of my own will and whether I am satisfied at the end of watching it.
There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.
And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.
Fair. I guess in my case I’m actually looking for boring titles because I see reducing my engagement as a whole to the platform a good thing even if it means I don’t watch some genuinely interesting / informative content. Basically I am less likely to fall into a rabbit hole of watching “just one more video” by some creator I enjoy when I should be doing something else.
I find YouTube itself to be so adversarial that I don’t even use it anymore.
Still, I’m installing both this and SponsorBlock to symbolically show support to this of projects that IMHO show that I want the Web MY way. I don’t want to browse in whatever way maximizes attention and distraction to increase profit margin of surveillance capitalism.
Interesting that this extension is pay only, first time I see this. Again makes sense to go against a business model of “free” of cost but too expensive for sanity.
Are you talking about DeArrow? The website gives you the option to pay or just download without paying.
Yes I’m talking about DeArrow. Well yes but to be more precise they initially “block” the addon from working for few hours then they let you use it without paying. Slightly different, again I’m not criticizing just highlighting this is not how most add-ons do work.
Well, if that’s how it worked before, they must’ve changed it. I installed it last night without paying and it never blocked me.
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.
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
They do exactly this. You’ve never seen the same video appear twice, and the second time it has a different title and thumbnail? That’s how they figured out how effective clickbait is.
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
To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”
I thought it was pretty clear that “they” = YouTube…
It’s not YouTube though, it’s the YouTuber
The YouTuber can’t do it without YouTube making it available
my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!
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.
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.
That’s cool
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 :/
This is genuinely amazing. Thanks!!
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.
Default part of the Piped interface, BTW, along with Sponsorblock.
best extension
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.
One of the best addons you can get. Period.
It’s like a paradigm shift when you browse YouTube after enabling it.
This plus using ublock to remove useless UI elements makes for a prime disenshittified YouTube experience.
- uBlock Origin
- DeArrow
- Sponsorblock
- Return YouTube Dislike
Or for everything built-in: Piped
Unhook for removing crap.
Jump Cutter for the superior video speed experience.
How’s invidious? Aren’t they very similar?
I never used it, but yeah I guess it’s basically the same. LibreTube, the Android App I use, just happens to use piped so I selfhost that and therefore also use it on the desktop.
Don’t forget Enhancer for Youtube. A metric ton of Youtube customizations and quality of life features, also includes disabling shorts or converting them into the standard Youtube video format.
Sounds like piped also has most of that. As a bonus, piped requires no account, no addons and no direct connection to google.
Also Freetube has these features.
Freetube includes Dearrow?
Yep
Nice. Definitely will be using that
I use all of these XD
You convinced me, I’m totally adding this today! :)
I also would throw in sponsorblock to that too - it skips all the “but first, Raid Shadow Legends…” “don’t forget to like share and subscribe” nonsense :)
edit: thank you, I just poked into YouTube Revanced, and found DeArrow was on! This explains why I didn’t like youtube’s content when on my PC, so I’ll 100% be adding this to Firefox! :)
Interesting, I had to enable dearrow in ReVanced manually. It was disabled by default.
Thinking about it, I would not put it past me to have set it and forgotten 😂 it’s been a while since I played about with the settings!
The way I found about was, finding the Firefox extension first, which then motivated me to search for the config option
Using uBlock Origin to get rid of the Youtube Shorts section of the sub feed was amazing for me. Are there other things you block too?
Here’s a non exhaustive list of things I’ve blocked:
- The pill strip on top with a list of video topics (don’t know what the official term is.)
- YouTube shorts suggestions.
- Ads that are injected into the suggestions.
- “Shorts remixing this video” section in the video descriptions.
I’ll perhaps share my ublock filter list for YouTube later.
Edit: My uBlock Origin filters:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-feed-nudge-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com###voice-search-button www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com##yt-related-chip-cloud-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com##.ytd-ad-slot-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1) www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2) www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-structured-description-content-renderer.style-scopeThanks for the list, I’ll be trying these!
The pill strip on top with a list of video topics
There’s one reason not to block this: all the way on the right of that list is a “new to you” feed button, which is pretty neat to try sometimes.
Could you share the URL of that link? IMO, there should be a better way of presenting that than on the pill bar on the top.
Thanks! I’m going to try these.
The way some of the titles are changed is quite funny to me. It’s like if you saw a big scary looking ghost on Halloween and then you rip the sheet off and it’s just Huey, Dewey and Louie stacked on top of each other.
I Bought Ten of the WEIRDEST Phones EVER
to
Reviewing Old Phones with Alternative Form Factors
i dont think that’s a helpful change though. it’s supposed to remove clickbait, not translate to an alien language. alternative form factors? is this written by the Borg? you can call things weird, that’s not clickbait if it’s accurate.
Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.
