cross-posted from: https://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.

  • deathmetal27@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • Lucy :3@feddit.org
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      1 month ago
      • uBlock Origin
      • DeArrow
      • Sponsorblock
      • Return YouTube Dislike

      Or for everything built-in: Piped

    • Go-On-A-Steam-Train@lemmy.ml
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      1 month 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 :)

      edit: thank you, I just poked into YouTube Revanced, and found DeArrow was on! This explains why I didn’t like youtube’s content when on my PC, so I’ll 100% be adding this to Firefox! :)

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Interesting, I had to enable dearrow in ReVanced manually. It was disabled by default.

        • Go-On-A-Steam-Train@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          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!

          • takeda@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            The way I found about was, finding the Firefox extension first, which then motivated me to search for the config option

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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?

      • deathmetal27@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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.

        Edit: My uBlock Origin filters:

        www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-feed-nudge-renderer.style-scope
        www.youtube.com###voice-search-button
        www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
        www.youtube.com##yt-related-chip-cloud-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope
        www.youtube.com##.ytd-ad-slot-renderer.style-scope
        www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
        www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
        www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-structured-description-content-renderer.style-scope
        
        • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • deathmetal27@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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              21 days ago

              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.

  • Ilandar@aussie.zone
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    1 month 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

    • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 days 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.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • guy_threepwood@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

  • Kushan@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • Frog@lemmy.ca
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      1 month 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.

      • rowdyrockets@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        The icon and hover to reveal previous title has been available in the extension for a long while.

        • Frog@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          Sorry. I was using it with Freetube, not the extension.

          Thank you for pointing that out.

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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.

  • AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/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.

    • Tier 1 Build-A-Bear 🧸@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    1 month 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.

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      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).

      • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        There’s no active a/b testing though. The creators have to specifically change the thumbnail for everyone at once. From what I understand.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          1 month ago

          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.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      1 month 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.

      • SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month 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.

      • Omniraptor@lemm.ee
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        1 month 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. I don’t think YouTube does this by itself if the uploader doesn’t enable it

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      1 month 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.

      Although chances are you’re just replacing one shitty thing with a different shitty thing.

      • wildn0x@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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.

      • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it’s costly, though, but it’d be nice to have.

      • yamanii@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        ChatGPT could download the transcript and just build a short summary.

        Then you wouldn’t watch the video and the creator just lost.

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          1 month ago

          Isn’t that basically the point of the extension? Making sure you’re not tricked into watching BS content?

  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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    1 month ago

    The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

    No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

    Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.

    • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      I agree. I think what you describe is also seen in sponsor block.

      People mark story telling videos mostly as filler content, so a beautiful 10 minute video is chopped down to only a minute or two and most of what makes the video great is removed.

      Live music sets where people segment out the intro and outro to songs, so tracks are mashed together for a non-stop music experience, which I think misses the mark with live music.

      I also find a lot of sponsor segments are done quite badly like the person who made them doesn’t care or is in a rush. Eg. Today I came a sponsor segment that started 11 seconds too early. I only recognised it because it kicked in half way through a sentence.

      Don’t get me wrong, I still use the extension; I’ve just disabled most of the auto actions.

      Many moons ago I tried Darrow for a day and got the same feeling as what your described. I decided the original video titles are superior and disabled the extension.

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      yeah, I’ve got it set to off by default. i used it almost like a spoiler tag. click the button to see the answer to “THIS AMAZING DEVICE DOES WHAT???”

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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        Yeah, it’s possible that wasn’t an option back when I used it. I remember thinking that some sort of default off would be better. At the time I think it was either on by default and toggleable - I always toggled it - or it was just disabled and unwieldy to enable.

        Edit: actually even better would be to have a short community written summary that could be more descriptive. Just like a popup or something. I don’t need the title to disappear, just know if the video is worth my time.

        • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          ooh yeah, a good tooltip on mouseover would be perfect.

          there is quite a bit of granularity to the options these days if you haven’t tried it in a bit. I was able to make it work more or less exactly how i wanted.

    • __matthew__@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I respectfully disagree. Any high quality creator is tangibly penalized by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm for not optimizing their titles and thumbnails. A rare few choose to take this penalty but I don’t blame the many quality creators who choose to take part in the game that YouTube has made for everyone.

      Yes, the alternate titles may not be perfect, but I’d take any random person’s attempt at a title over the hyper optimized ones any day because I’d rather make an informed decision to watch something even if there is some degree of inaccuracy than to make a completely uninformed decision based on what an algorithm predicted would most likely get me to click and get hooked on a video irregardless of my own will and whether I am satisfied at the end of watching it.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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        1 month ago

        There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

        And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.

        • __matthew__@lemmy.world
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          30 days ago

          Fair. I guess in my case I’m actually looking for boring titles because I see reducing my engagement as a whole to the platform a good thing even if it means I don’t watch some genuinely interesting / informative content. Basically I am less likely to fall into a rabbit hole of watching “just one more video” by some creator I enjoy when I should be doing something else.

  • utopiah@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I find YouTube itself to be so adversarial that I don’t even use it anymore.

    Still, I’m installing both this and SponsorBlock to symbolically show support to this of projects that IMHO show that I want the Web MY way. I don’t want to browse in whatever way maximizes attention and distraction to increase profit margin of surveillance capitalism.

    • utopiah@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Interesting that this extension is pay only, first time I see this. Again makes sense to go against a business model of “free” of cost but too expensive for sanity.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Are you talking about DeArrow? The website gives you the option to pay or just download without paying.

        • utopiah@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Yes I’m talking about DeArrow. Well yes but to be more precise they initially “block” the addon from working for few hours then they let you use it without paying. Slightly different, again I’m not criticizing just highlighting this is not how most add-ons do work.

          • howrar@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            Well, if that’s how it worked before, they must’ve changed it. I installed it last night without paying and it never blocked me.

  • lefixxx@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.

  • troed@fedia.io
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    1 month ago

    Love it. While not all titles get replaced (crowd sourced) just the fact that the thumbnails get normalized is enough for it to be worth it.

  • ben@lemmy.zip
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    1 month 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.

    • tourist@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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.

  • sma3in@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!