10mo ago

DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube.

dearrow.ajay.app

DeArrow - A Browser Extension for Better Titles and Thumbnails

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.

86 comments

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
  
  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.
  
  Also Freetube has these features.
  
  I use all of these XD
  
  Unhook for removing crap.
  Jump Cutter for the superior video speed experience.
  
  How's invidious? Aren't they very similar?
- 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.
- 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-scope
- Yeah the title change I don't get in cases like that.
  I Bought Ten of the WEIRDEST Phones EVER
  Is a lot more descriptive of what the video is.
- 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.
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.
- 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
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.
- 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
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.
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.
- 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.
I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!
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 :/
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.
This is genuinely amazing. Thanks!!
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
Default part of the Piped interface, BTW, along with Sponsorblock.
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.
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.
I love this extension, although the install process can best be described as labyrinthian. It's crazy how many videos have the altered metadata compared to how many people I'd expect to use the extension; I guess we're all active on Youtube, likely to contribute, and may see similar videos.
Highly recommend!

86 comments