Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
Review by Bobby
Rated 1 out of 5
by Bobby, a year agoEDIT: I'm curious why the developer has intentionally decide to get the extension to make changes where no changes are required - especially since it provides a worse user experience with YouTube. They haven't explained the licencing...
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People needlessly change titles and thumbnails for no reason, not to mention they do so incorrectly most of the time.
Eg.
Titles: brand and product names have a specific capitalization set by the brand and product owners but people will change it to something else. People will also randomly capitalize random words in the title.
Thumbnails: thumbnails show exactly what the video is about and they use the correct words to describe it exactly. People will change it to a random thumbnail.
If people can't get the fundamentals right, then why would i trust the extension to actually correct a misleading/clickbait title and thumbnail.
Like SponsorBlock, there is no quality control. Anyone can submit any garbage and everyone else just has to put up with it. There is no method to hide submissions by those who submit garbage.
Furthermore, why does the extension require a paid licence?! People contribute towards the extension for free. Are you seriously planning to do a rug pull on those that add value to the extension.
Sure you're giving out free licences right now, but when will that change?
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People needlessly change titles and thumbnails for no reason, not to mention they do so incorrectly most of the time.
Eg.
Titles: brand and product names have a specific capitalization set by the brand and product owners but people will change it to something else. People will also randomly capitalize random words in the title.
Thumbnails: thumbnails show exactly what the video is about and they use the correct words to describe it exactly. People will change it to a random thumbnail.
If people can't get the fundamentals right, then why would i trust the extension to actually correct a misleading/clickbait title and thumbnail.
Like SponsorBlock, there is no quality control. Anyone can submit any garbage and everyone else just has to put up with it. There is no method to hide submissions by those who submit garbage.
Furthermore, why does the extension require a paid licence?! People contribute towards the extension for free. Are you seriously planning to do a rug pull on those that add value to the extension.
Sure you're giving out free licences right now, but when will that change?
Developer response
posted a year agoResponse to edit:
The defaults are chosen in the way that I, and many others, like to use the extension. They are on the aggressive side, but that's why I made the extension so customizable. There are numerous options to turn down the aggressiveness, and you can configure all of these options per channel to be able to be aggressive with some channels, but less aggressive with others.
People have different opinions on what they like, I personally like all titles auto formatted and having all thumbnails replaced.
About the license, there will always be a free option, and all license keys are unlimited use, so you can use them on new devices and you can even share it with your friends.
I promise to never remove this, and I wouldn't want to do this anyway, as I want as many people to using DeArrow as possible, as that's how crowdsourced extensions works.
The soft-ish paywall acts as an aggressive donation barrier convincing a few people to donate, but still allowing everyone else to use the extension with all it's features just like anyone else. It is not meant to restrict who is using the extension. Only a certain amount of people need to pay to make it work.
Thanks to the paywall system, I am now earning enough money that I will be able to work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow full time when I graduate school in January and I am very much looking forward to that :)
Original Response:
I think you are misunderstanding some parts of the extension. The things you are talking about are not human submissions, but configurable automatic systems enabled by default.
By default, it auto-formats titles if no user submission exists. These are not submitted by users, but an automatic formatting system. You can change how this auto-formatting works in the options and also disable it.
By default, it shows a random screenshot from the videos from thumbnails if there is no human submission. You can also configure this in settings if you don't like that behavior, or disable thumbnail replacements altogether if that's not your thing.
Lastly, it is not possible for me to "rug-pull", as the code is open source under a copy-left license, and the database is publicly downloadable, and several other people are actively mirroring this data.
Hope that makes things clearer :)
The defaults are chosen in the way that I, and many others, like to use the extension. They are on the aggressive side, but that's why I made the extension so customizable. There are numerous options to turn down the aggressiveness, and you can configure all of these options per channel to be able to be aggressive with some channels, but less aggressive with others.
People have different opinions on what they like, I personally like all titles auto formatted and having all thumbnails replaced.
About the license, there will always be a free option, and all license keys are unlimited use, so you can use them on new devices and you can even share it with your friends.
I promise to never remove this, and I wouldn't want to do this anyway, as I want as many people to using DeArrow as possible, as that's how crowdsourced extensions works.
The soft-ish paywall acts as an aggressive donation barrier convincing a few people to donate, but still allowing everyone else to use the extension with all it's features just like anyone else. It is not meant to restrict who is using the extension. Only a certain amount of people need to pay to make it work.
Thanks to the paywall system, I am now earning enough money that I will be able to work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow full time when I graduate school in January and I am very much looking forward to that :)
Original Response:
I think you are misunderstanding some parts of the extension. The things you are talking about are not human submissions, but configurable automatic systems enabled by default.
By default, it auto-formats titles if no user submission exists. These are not submitted by users, but an automatic formatting system. You can change how this auto-formatting works in the options and also disable it.
By default, it shows a random screenshot from the videos from thumbnails if there is no human submission. You can also configure this in settings if you don't like that behavior, or disable thumbnail replacements altogether if that's not your thing.
Lastly, it is not possible for me to "rug-pull", as the code is open source under a copy-left license, and the database is publicly downloadable, and several other people are actively mirroring this data.
Hope that makes things clearer :)
285 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15028866, 13 minutes ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15148485, 2 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14272180, 6 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18794785, 8 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by blackrose, 9 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by James, 9 days agoA great add-on if you dont want a click bait title and thumbnail
- Rated 4 out of 5by Gaming4, 11 days agoThis is a cool extension, dont find it too useful for the stuff I've curated for my feed though. Could be cool if you could filter out music videos thumbnails, so that you can see the original ones, other than that this works great.
- Rated 1 out of 5by yowidin, 15 days agoMakes YouTube almost unusable: adds a considerable delay to every UI interaction. For example pausing or resuming a video takes 5-20 seconds.
Developer response
posted 14 days agoIt seems like another extension might be conflicting. Could you try disabling other extensions? Maybe another extension is also changing video links. - Rated 1 out of 5by malau, 15 days agoThis extension no longer works with Firefox >133. The popup box that asks you to confirm that you are adhering to the 3 main rules is just a blank black box.
When it used to work - 5 stars
To devs reply. Yes, I understand how it is SUPPOSED to work, because it USED to work in the manner you describe. But now I just get a blank black box where the rules SHOULD beDeveloper response
posted 14 days agoThere are four rules. You have to check off each rule at a time. It only happens on your first submission and every few weeks. - Rated 5 out of 5by Alan, 16 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by SRS, 16 days agoIts a good add-on (as expected from Sponsorblock dev), however i believe it relies a bit too much on crowd sourcing
In my opinion, it should use one of those AI websites which summaries a youtube and do it for the titles. - Rated 1 out of 5by Th4t, 18 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Ad-Free Life, 22 days agoThis is an interesting compromise. I think I'll keep using it, because it makes the recommendations/searches a lot more relaxing to look at. But the downside is making videos seem better than they are, because if the title and thumbnail are bad, the video itself probably is too, and this hides that signal. I haven't been using it all that long and there's already been a couple times when I've really hated a video, then looked at the original title and thumbnail and realised that I wouldn't have clicked on it if I wasn't using DeArrow. It does prevent videos from lying about their contents in the title, so it may well save time overall. There's a deep problem with Youtube that is probably impossible to patch over with a browser extension, and this is still a useful tool.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Azarilh, 24 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by EliteCanadian, a month agoI created an account with Firefox in order to review this outstanding extension. Ajay, thank you for helping with the overwhelming lack of ethics within "creators"
My favorite part (and the main reason for this review) is that it was a LTT thumbnail that made me reinstall this, Linus's thumbnails are the biggest clickbait, but to see LTT featured on this MAIN SHAMING PAGE, love it.
Highly recommended to anyone that's sick and tired of "creators" abusing their followers. - Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 18747889, a month agoTells you to activate and there's no option to get free access as the page doesn't work
"An error occurred during a connection to dearrow.ajay.app."
e/ I'd suggest allowing access to addon in some way without connecting to a website so that the addon is usable for people facing similar issueDeveloper response
posted a month agoIt sounds like something on your network is disallowing connections to dearrow.ajay.app
If you aren't able to use the free access system, try using this key: Fbmzg-7c642 - Rated 4 out of 5by Tyrand, a month agoNot nearly as useful as SponsorBlock.
Perfectly adequate not-clickbait titles keep getting changed into generic titles
Takes too many clicks to downvote a bad title. - Rated 5 out of 5by Killerhurtz, 2 months ago15 seconds into the free 60 minute trial and my youtube front page was already so much more pleasant that I sprung for the $1 license.
I expected nothing less from the dev of SponsorBlock :) - Rated 5 out of 5by gorp, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18715530, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by RainbuDeer, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18714554, 2 months agoVery helpful, you thought of everything and more. I will be donating when I am able to, fantastic work from everyone who worked on this
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13483122, 2 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by 00yunje, 3 months agoDepending on who you're subscribed to, this might not make much impact on your browsing experience. Due to titles being crowd-sourced, not every video will be equally affected. Sometimes, the suggested titles can get REALLY pedantic for otherwise perfectly serviceable titles. For example, "The History of The Simpsons Hit & Run World Records" by Summoning Salt became... "The History of The Simpsons Hit & Run (All Story Missions) World Records". Like, that's *barely* more information, and it's stuff I think most people would've assumed anyway from the original title. However, in both cases I've seen this happen, they've reverted back to the original titles soon after. (There's not even a record of there ever being a proposed title, so you're just gonna have to trust me that they were there. I know what I saw.)
Generally, they make the biggest difference with channels like Kurzgesagt or Tom Scott, creators they specifically showcase in the screenshots. Titles can be a bit of a mixed bag for others, but more for the fact that not every video - that might need a retitle - will get them. The generic thumbnail replacer makes the bigger difference to me, imo. It just gives you an honest impression of what each video's gonna look like, literally. And it's nice not having to deal with the obnoxious, gaudy thumbnails people put out sometimes.
Despite the occasionally questionable re-titles, I think the crowd-sourced titles are decent and in good faith. I appreciate the number of guidelines the devs put out to even propose a proper title. It sort of feels like Wikipedia - it might have its vandals, but collectively I think it's in good hands.