please update it to work with the recent new youtube layout! the button to show/hide the replaced thumbnail/title now moves around when you try to click it, very annoying

Like its sister extension (SponsorBlock), DeArrow changes the game when it comes to experiencing Youtube. If only were were a solution on mobile and elsewhere, too. Crowdsourced video titles means no more hyperbole, obnoxious formatting, and outright lying or baiting. And when you *do* run into those things, it feels good improving them so that others with the extension can benefit from a clearer and cleaner experience. I almost never pay or donate for extensions (though I have), but I immediately did so for DeArrow and SponsorBlock. I hope these extensions both grow in popularity, so even more videos are improved at a faster rate.

The only reason I knocked a star off of this review is that if I don't QUICKLY add the title when the input interface is open, it will always kill my entire browser (Zen Browser on Windows 11 usually). Everything -- all windows, tabs, etc -- the whole browser just hangs and the only way to get it working again is to kill the process and launch again. It happens so quickly that I have to type my title out in notepad, then copy it so that as soon as I open the input interface, I can immediately paste it in and hit the submit button.

However, if using it passively (not contributing -- just getting the benefit of better titles), it has no apparent negative impact. I would contribute more frequently if it were more stable, but it is otherwise terrific.

Awesome, this and sponsorblock are literally making youtube less of a clickbait hellscape

Only gave 4 stars because it lacks the community sponsorblock has and the UI is a bit finicky, it definitely needs to be improved. Once the community is there, this extension will be much more useful since we can better rely on the voting system and be able to overwrite most videos out there more easily.

This 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.

I wasn't sure about this when I first installed it, but now that I've gotten used to it it has taken hold of me and I resent its absence. It makes browsing youtube search results and recommendations a lot more relaxing. Now, it's generally nice not to see obnoxious thumbnails, except they do often belong to obnoxious *videos*, which no extension can fix, and the replacements can seem misleadingly like something that might be worth clicking on. On every video link, the extension adds a button to show the original title and thumbnail rather than the dearrowed one, and I did have to get in the habit of checking that before watching a video, but now I hardly think about it.

Tells 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 issue

Not 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.

Depending 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.

I think people should be able to vote without clicking into the video. it would make the system more engaging to incentivize participation, and maybe lead to less low quality changes. Unless you are submitting, judging the quality or annoyingness of a title/thumbnail doesnt require watching it.

Great extension, but sometimes titles are blank

Awesome addon, but I'd love to have an easier way to add a channel (or even a video) to the allowlist directly from the youtube page without having to open the settings in a separate tab.

Amazing extension. It basically transformed my YouTube into something that doesn't look like it's aimed for 5 year olds with a chronic clicking addiction. It genuinely reminds me of old YouTube... you know, back when it actually worked. However, right now it seems like on most pages, especially if there are a lot of videos on screen, it takes a second to load all the thumbnails and titles. It makes sense as it's fetching data from the server(s). But it does mean that your internet should be somewhat decent, and so does your CPU. Keep those things in mind. Fortunately, you can quickly turn the extension on and off to test things out.

It's good, but haven't tested it for too long. I use this extension as a back-up for videos with click-bait or sensationalized titles I want a alternative to, and do not use its titles and thumbnails as the default way to look at YouTube videos. The descriptive titles act more like titles to scientific papers in their betrayal of the contents of the video. It is of my opinion that titles of educational videos should be more descriptive and long. Artistic titles, and titles that have metaphors should have titles keep its integrity, and skits, artistic video strictly for non-informative entertainment shouldn't be changed.

But, a compromise should be reached for the people who think some ""REDDITORS'"" title changes are UNNECESSARY EARTH SHATTERING RUINING YouTube⸮, to these people I say look at your setting: "Behaviors > Default to Original Video Information" will make it opt-in, and you could only look at the DeArrow version when you want a more descriptive title. I also detest that asking users to pay for software that heavily relies on data hosted on a server is being called "shady", as you are normalizing developers being under funded enough to not be able to support their software. Servers cost money = server needs funding -> people unwilling to pay = hard to keep servers running/cost comes out of dev's pocket. With all of that out of the way, This is an biased review based on my use-case, but so was theirs, so now we get both sides of the coin.

A feature I personally think would be nice to add — but of course not mandatory — is a 70%-80% democratic vote for if a video is plagiarized, with a attached source to accompany it. This would greatly help push for more accountability within the "video essay" and "educational" online sphere.

It's a fine extension, it does what it is supposed to do however the concept gets ruined by moronic title edits made by idiots. So often I see fine, non-problematic titles being replaced with a non-descriptive mess. Important/valuable information gets removed for the sake of being changed, and I end up thinking "who thought this edit would be a good idea?" so often.

For example, this video:
"BETA SQUAD MAFIA GAME FT DEJI (CHILLI FORFEIT)"
gets changed to:
"Mafia E11"
whereas a better title would be:
"Beta Squad: Mafia E11 ft. Deji"

Here's another stupid change on a video from Techquickie:
Original: "Why do speakers hiss?"
Replaced: "speaker Noise: Hiss and Hum"

I try using the voting feature to downvote the awful new titles / I try to submit my own but I have no idea if it does anything as I never see anything change. The thumbs up/down emoji does a twirl and there's no indication if it did anything or what it does. This panel really needs some improvement.

I love the extension. I don't like the paywall (I know the wall is paper-thin, but still).

In Korea, there are a lot of fake video titles, almost all of which are different from the main content (especially news), but these extension don't change anything.
Honestly, if you were to filter out Korean videos that routinely lure users with more than 100 fake titles per minute, this extension would probably be installed by default on all browsers in Korea lol

Really cool add-on but it consistently makes youtube load slower, and sometimes not at all. Hopefully server side stuff gets solved soon.

Have been using for some time in Chrome on my work PC, now trying out also on Firefox at home. I actually really like how the add-on works. I see no slow-downs or glitches.

Some people are commenting that the descriptive titles tend to "spoil" the video but in my opinion this is exactly the point. You can always switch off the default replacements and then you only see the "dearrowed" description after clicking on the blue button.

The one issue I have is that since actual work of replacing clickbaits with descriptions is crowsourced, this extension needs more people using it. And I think for many people the short free trial is off-putting and they won't even bother to click "I don't want to pay" before uninstalling the whole thing. (I paid btw)
I think it would be glorious if the DeArrow functionality was eventually included in SponsorBlock which has a much bigger user base.

END clickbait. Pair with SponsorBlock extension. Spare others the agony of clickbait. Apply business professional english to titles. Replace lame clickbait load frames. Everyone who matters wins. Continue to block youtube ads with privoxy, a loopback proxy for firefox.

Unfortunately this extension requires purchase.

has a tendency to replace video titles with content descriptions, which, while good, does spoil the twist of the video in some cases (see hbomberguy's robloxoof.mp3 video) and can end up removing thumbnail art that is more of a title card than clickbait.
biggest suggestion would be to allow for a setting to remove clickbait while allowing actual titles to stay, but then you're asking a democratic userbase to deal with nuance sooo
overall ok first impression, good job Ajay Ramachandran.

edit: tbh, it's more funny than annoying to me

Really useful.