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.
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
Also Freetube has these features.
Freetube includes Dearrow?
Yep
Nice. Definitely will be using that
I use all of these XD
Unhook for removing crap.
Jump Cutter for the superior video speed experience.
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! I’m going to try 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 for the list, I’ll be trying these!
Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 like the concept and I have it installed, but I don’t contribute to it because I find it challenging to think of better titles. It’s not easy like with Sponsorblock that I regularly submit to. For example, sometimes I need to watch most of the video first to be accurate, and by then I’ve already moved on to the next video. Other times it’s simply hard for me to condense the content of the video accurately into so many characters when the original title is way off.
I do like the way it makes all the titles lowercase, though. I find that changes the tone of the video feed quite a bit.
This might actually be one of the few things AI could be used for. ChatGPT could download the transcript and just build a short summary.
Although chances are you’re just replacing one shitty thing with a different shitty thing.
YouTube has already been helpful to a degree. Sometimes I’ll open their AI summarize and it will give all the details along with timestamps. There are videos where I saw the summary and passed on watching because the video was mostly filler material.
Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it’s costly, though, but it’d be nice to have.
ChatGPT could download the transcript and just build a short summary.
Then you wouldn’t watch the video and the creator just lost.
If your video can be replaced by a title, it probably wasn’t with watching
Isn’t that basically the point of the extension? Making sure you’re not tricked into watching BS content?
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
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.
I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.
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.
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.
People are going at great length to work around the cancer that is youtube. It’s a nice idea, but in the end, only a boycott will work.
It will eventually find issues with malicious users but for now, it’s an incredible concept.
I’ve been using this extension for over a year now. The only malicious use I’ve seen has been petty.
Occasionally see a video from a controversial creator titled something like “Asshole talks about stupid bullshit for 25 minutes” on fresh uploads.
The titles do change quite a bit. A lot of my title suggestions were changed/improved by others.
There’s a voting system, so you’d need a big group of bad actors fighting uphill for something that isn’t really all that worth it.
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using 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.
