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.
This is genuinely amazing. Thanks!!
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’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 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.
Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.
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 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.
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.
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.
my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!
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.
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?
Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it’s costly, though, but it’d be nice to have.
I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.
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
That example, losing the artwork of the Kurzgesagt videos is pretty bad though.
You can whitelist channels to not replace their thumbnails.
That’s cool
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.
