Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
Review by Dishater
Rated 3 out of 5
by Dishater, 4 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.
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 4 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.