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

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27520080

Okay, Biden isn’t popular. But his policies sure are. - Divisions by zero

> President Biden’s policy agenda is incredibly popular, much more popular than his opponent’s. But Biden the man? Not so much. > The question now is whom to blame for the approval gap between the president and his agenda: voters, the media or Biden himself. > Democrats have long argued that their policies are more popular than those of Republicans. In a recent blind test conducted by YouGov, that was unmistakably true. The polling organization asked Americans what they thought about major policies proposed by Biden and Donald Trump without specifying who proposed them. The idea was to see how the public perceived ideas when stripped of tribal associations. > Biden’s agenda was the winner, hands down. > Of the 28 Biden proposals YouGov asked about, 27 were supported by more people than opposed them. Impressively, 24 received support from more than 50 percent of respondents.

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.

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 :)

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
  • 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.
Sounds like piped also has most of that. As a bonus, piped requires no account, no addons and no direct connection to google.
I use all of these XD
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.
Unhook for removing crap, Jump Cutter for the superior video speed experience.
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.

Thanks! 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.
Unfortunately there’s no URL to go with that feature, it must be JS-activated. Same goes for the Recently Uploaded and Watched tabs which are new in that same vein.
Thanks for the list, I’ll be trying these!

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.

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.

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.
Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.

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.

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 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.

Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it’s costly, though, but it’d be nice to have.
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?
I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.

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.

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

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.

GitHub - pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube: Replaces thumbnails and modifies titles of videos on youtube.com

Replaces thumbnails and modifies titles of videos on youtube.com - pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube

GitHub

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 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!

Default part of the Piped interface, BTW, along with Sponsorblock.

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.
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.