Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
273 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by MrX, 5 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Dishater, 5 months agoLet's get this out of the way, this doesn't remove clickbait. There's too many channels posting garbage by the second for new titles to be submitted and the De-Arrow user count is a fraction of SponsorBlock's.
What this actually does is remove sensationalism from channels that people watch regularly. Sometimes to an asinine degree. (ha i know big word)
"The city with a hundred private cable cars" is a video from Tom Scott. A De-Arrow user changed this to "Wellington has over one hundred private cable cars". For some reason I guess "this city" was deemed too sensational or vague, so adding the city name and a slight rewording makes it less so?
Another Tom Scott example, "Things are changing at the world's oldest hotel" becomes "Modernization of a Japanese hotel that is technically the world's oldest operating business". Okay, an example of a title that's actually de-sensationalized by a user, but now it's longer than needed and over-descriptive. Many titles are like this, if the De-Arrow community made a restaurant menu, common delicacies would include "Not actually French potato fries" and "Ground beef patty sandwiches with vegetables, condiments, and cheese in soggy buns".
De-Arrow has a voting system where you can dislike or like submitted elements and submit your own, but the Tom Scott examples above are submitted and locked by VIPs.
What's a VIP? Well, someone with insider access who can submit titles/thumbnails and no amount of dislikes or voting can displace their locked submissions. Currently, there's no way to apply for VIP status, it's strictly for the coolest of dudes. I'd be fine with VIPs getting an voting boost based on their status, but not being able to vote on these titles is stupid. This isn't SponsorBlock, where a Sponsor segment can be objectively correct based on start/end time, someone may be able to summarize the info into something better, like "Modernization of the oldest operating hotel".
Filler tangent/jokes aside, I'd still recommend De-Arrow to display auto-generated or user-submitted thumbnails, I don't have much to complain about there other than thumbnails sometimes not loading when enabled. For title replacement, you can use the "channel allowlist" so selected channels use custom blocking settings, although some visual issues occur on YouTube when both whitelisting and blacklisting, keep that in mind.Developer response
posted 5 months agoAs for the second part of your review about "VIP" locked titles, we have partially resolved this by having now allowing them to submit segments as normal users for when it seems better to leave it up to votes. We also have a channel that logs downvoted "VIP" locked titles to fix if there are issues. - Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18514343, 5 months agoNot a terrible idea but the culture is awful, titles are often VERY unnecessarily edited and actually take away from the youtube experience.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tanvir, 5 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by TheCraiggers, 6 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Jakk, 6 months agoFantastic, completely non-intrusive. It's nice actually knowing what certain videos are going to be about before clicking them.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14425985, 6 months agoWorth the dollar. When videos are missing submissions I feel compelled to add one.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14230878, 6 months agoThis makes YouTube bearable. I miss it when I'm on mobile.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18493127, 6 months agoThis add-on makes Youtube seem so dull.
And that's a good thing.
Only issues I can see is that I keep checking the original titles out of curiosity (which is my own fault) and that the page lagged severely when I tested it on Mr. Beast's channel (which was rather amusing). - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18100227, 6 months agoImmediately my YouTube homepage became much easier to the eye, I'm also way less prone to click on stuff I really wouldn't have clicked otherwise (which I bet is exactly the purpose of this).
I like it so much more, in a sense the thumbnails become a little insipid, which is something one has to unlearn, but overall this extension brings unfathomed peace.
I think that acronyms should remain unchanged, since its easier to comprehend what's the title all about; also looks better, specially on team names and such.
Thank you very much. I'm an unpaid user, so thank you again and will send my grain of sand once I'm able to.
Thanks again. As an avid YouTube user, I really recommend this extension.
Check other extensions such as SponsorBlock, Enchancer for YouTube, Return YouTube Dislike and YouTube Short Block, all of which I use. - Rated 5 out of 5by Leo7K, 6 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by geeknik, 6 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Shad, 6 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Sengonul35, 6 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by yellowfox, 6 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by yaxe, 6 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by qwertyuiop, 6 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tuana, 7 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by dikunav, 7 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by AmberDambey, 7 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Wuzzle, 7 months agoMy own feelings about the lead dev aside (I dislike him for personal reasons), this addon isn't very good, a lot of the rules and guidelines as well as the nature of the extension lead to titles and thumbnails that are subjectively clickbait and/or bad being treated as objectively clickbait and/or bad and being replaced with titles and thumbnails not suited to the content of the video with an overly complex whitelisting system not helping matters in the slightest.
It also asks for payment up front to use it right away, which is very shady for an extension. Though if asked, the lead dev will give you a code if you ask for one in a review, though not in exchange for a review, or ask on his discord server.
EDIT: Since the dev took time out of his busy day and replied to this review I will provide further context and say that these reasons were not communicated to me at all until after he'd removed my moderator status and blocked me and that I had to complain on his public discord server in order to get a response from him, which boiled down to "People were complaining about your attitude" which I was entirely unaware of and thus I was not given a chance to fix this problem until it was too late
If there were any other reasons besides that, then those were never communicated to me either
Also clarified some language about keys and reviewsDeveloper response
posted 7 months agoFor context, this person was formerly a sponsorblock and dearrow "VIP"/moderator that we unfortunately decided to demote for several reasons - Rated 5 out of 5by kloassie, 7 months agoWorks like a charm. I have the free 'version' bc I don't have a credit card (no need) and no paypal (don't trust pp), but when I find a suitable way to donate, I will. Anyways, I'd like an option to personally whitelist channels for showing original thumbnails - eg music channels that continuously show babes as thumbnails, I don't mind those polluting my view :-P
Developer response
posted 7 months agoCheck out the settings and "channel allowlist" feature. You can make a custom profile with whatever settings you want for specific subsets of channels.