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

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨basilisa@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

cross-posted from: 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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Comments

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deathmetal27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- 30p87@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  uBlock Origin
  
  DeArrow
  
  Sponsorblock
  
  Return YouTube Dislike
  
  Or for everything built-in: Piped
  
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  - blackluster117@possumpat.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - JayDee@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Also Freetube
    
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  - deathmetal27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I use all of these XD
    
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  - jaaaardvark@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Unhook for removing crap, Jump Cutter for the superior video speed experience.
    
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  - gregor@gregtech.eu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How’s invidious? Aren’t they very similar?
    
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- GoOnASteamTrain@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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 :)
  
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  - takeda@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Interesting, I had to enable dearrow in ReVanced manually. It was disabled by default.
    
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- zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - deathmetal27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Ilandar@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  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.
  
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guy_threepwood@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.

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Kushan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Frog@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - rowdyrockets@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The icon and hover to reveal previous title has been available in the extension for a long while.
    
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- yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Omniraptor@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: github.com/…/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.

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- Tier1BuildABear@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- jonne@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - wildn0x@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it’s costly, though, but it’d be nice to have.
    
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  - yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    ChatGPT could download the transcript and just build a short summary.
    
    Then you wouldn’t watch the video and the creator just lost.
    
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lefixxx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.

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yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That example, losing the artwork of the Kurzgesagt videos is pretty bad though.

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- ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Is it? The original artwork was fairly clickbaity imo.
  
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  - chaospatterns@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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”.
    
    One person could still say “crazy” makes it clickbait, but having some adjectives are fine
    
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- ajay@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It replaces it with the much more pleasing artwork from the actual video
  
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lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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darkevilmac@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It will eventually find issues with malicious users but for now, it’s an incredible concept.

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- tourist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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VitabytesDev@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.

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Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Now that’s something interesting. Does it work with piped?

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kratoz29@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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 :/

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Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is genuinely amazing. Thanks!!

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GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Default part of the Piped interface, BTW, along with Sponsorblock.

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cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
i love dearrow more than i love sponsorblock and ublock tbh <3

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- batcheck@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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 though.

Highly recommend!

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