Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube

by Firefox user 15704348, a year ago

Removing the clickbait from Youtube...brilliant, love it, makes Youtube a far more enjoyable and focused experience. Thanks Ajay!

by Firefox user 17940722, a year ago

by dzamie, a year ago

It's so refreshing to not be bombarded by clickbait thumbnails. Plus, the occasional rewritten video title is nice (though I enjoy the ability to temporarily see the originals). The only issue is that it takes longer to load the new thumbnails, but honestly that's not much of a problem.

by Carlosgs , a year ago

by display name, a year ago

Great idea. Though I am surprised that Tom Scott's channel was picked as a demonstration, as he is not a particularly bad offender in this respect, to the point where I personally do not mind having his original thumbnails and titles.

If you're aiming at something clickbaity, yet still informative enough to be worth spending time on redacting, maybe show, I dunno, LegalEagle? TLDR News? Linus Tech Tips? Karl Jobst?

Developer response

posted a year ago

Very recently, Tom Scott and CGP Grey have started going through their entire backlog and changing titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague. Channels doing things like this are a heavy inspiration for this extension.

It's not just the Linus Tech Tips or the Mr Beasts of the world doing algorithm optimized titles and thumbnails now. Even really great channels like Tom Scott, CGP Grey, and Kurzgesagt are falling for the trap now.

And I don't blame them! That's what's needed to survive on the platform these days. It's a race to the bottom.

DeArrow hopes to solve this. DeArrow puts everyone on a level playing field. There is no race to the bottom since no one is allowed to be algorithmically optimized. It pauses the race, and let's the true best videos rise to the top.

by p4t4, a year ago

Maks youtube functionally better

by Zack Bowden, a year ago

by Firefox user 15923203, a year ago

Great idea, but it slows down way too much. Especially on watch history page. It consumes my entire bandwith looking at task managers networking tab, above 800 mbps

Developer response

posted a year ago

Edit: The update I talked about is now released, so this should be fixed :)

Thanks!

So, there are two ways thumbnail generation works. One is via asking the server for one, and one is via downloading part of the video locally. Right now it tries both and stops when the first one loads.

Next update, I am going to change that behavior to always only use the server one, and only try local generation if the server hasn't responded in some time.

I also noticed a bug where sometimes local generation downloads the video multiple times, which might be amplifying the issue.

So, hopefully this issue will be fixed in the next update and you can try again then! thanks!

by merp, a year ago

by qUeLo_Vero, a year ago

by unbeatable-101, a year ago

by mschae23, a year ago

by cane, a year ago