Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
15 reviews
- Rated 2 out of 5by asid, 12 days agofrustrating. most titles / thumbnails are either verbose / useless or don't change at all. picking titles or thumbnails (both of which you have to do after already clicking on the video) does nothing 90% of the time and reverts after it does work, probably because majority vote matters more than your own, rather than just being the default used.
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 17139973, 5 months agojust kinda mid especially since you pay for it.
- Rated 2 out of 5by thib, 5 months agoIt almost exclusively work on channels that do mild and tolerable clickbait, for example Tom Scott
Developer response
posted 5 months agoThis extension is made for creators who upload good videos but with not so good titles and thumbnails. Tom Scott is a good example of that - Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18555405, 7 months agoIt definitely does its job, removing a lot of clickbaity titles and thumbnails, but I do sometimes find a lot of the changes redundant. I know this is due to user error but it is a bit annoying to see a video with a normal title be changed for no reason, or for videos to have very long titles. I've also had issues with YouTube's UI since using this extension, occasionally each row will try to display one more video than usual and glitches out some shelves on the recommended page. Additionally, one feature I found quite annoying was that every exclamation point in the titles of videos (that have not been manually changed) default to being periods instead. I find this change quite unnecessary, and usually just makes video titles look awkward. I can partially understand why this change is made, but I really do wish there was an option to remove it. Finally, I think the button to reveal the original video title and thumbnail is quite small, and sometimes I will click on videos I didn't mean to click on. While I like the idea of this extension, I'm not sure I'll be using it unless the kinks are worked out.
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18514343, 8 months agoNot a terrible idea but the culture is awful, titles are often VERY unnecessarily edited and actually take away from the youtube experience.
- Rated 2 out of 5by AmberDambey, 9 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Stoia, a year agoThe idea is quite nice! Giving some method of controlling clickbait is a good idea, the issue is that the "community" contributing these titles are pedantic nerds. (I say this as a pedantic nerd myself.)
Completely fine titles are being replaced with weirdly specific descriptions, take for example this XKCD Video title:
"What if everyone jumped at once?"
is replaced by:
"What if everyone was magically teleported to the same place on earth, then all jumped at once?"
This doesnt add _anything_ other then make the title three times as long and more confusing. Its also addressed that "everyone in the same place" is meant when jumping within literally the first frame of the video.
So while its a good plugin in itself, due to reliance on Crowdsource, its absolutely not anything you can daily drive.Developer response
posted a year agoWe do allow open ended questions under the guidelines for this type of video. But yea, some people like to submit pedantic stuff... Feel free to downvote and report so we can send them warnings or bans - Rated 2 out of 5by Parzival, a year agoReplaces "Trying the World's STRONGEST Beer" with "Trying Beers with Increasing ABV". Amazing idea in theory, but it helped me realize that the Youtube meta is there for a reason - to understand at a glance.
- Rated 2 out of 5by Aesara, a year agoA good idea in theory, in practice it's used by geeks who: a) don't watch videos with clickbait titles, and b) will rename titles with practically no effect other than saying "I was here". DeArrow titles often make me more annoyed than clickbait titles do because of how frivolous the userbase is.
- Rated 2 out of 5by folgoris, a year ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Ultradood, 2 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Jcuhfehl, 2 years ago"Open source" but the backend is paywalled. Paywalling any crowdsourced web service is plain unacceptable.
Edit: turns out my privacy concerns were unfounded, as the paywall is completely client side. It can therefore also be edited out with a single line of code.Developer response
posted 2 years agoAs noted on the payment page at the bottom, the license key is used in one request to the server to validate it, but is then never sent to the server again. Your userID and submissions are never sent with your license key so they cannot be linked.
The extension is also not fully paywalled. You can still request free access using the button at the bottom of the page, and I hope many people take this option! I don't want everyone to pay - Rated 2 out of 5by sparrow, 2 years agoit was really great but it stopped functioning and deleted all text in youtube
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 17993023, 2 years agoe2: my original complaint still stands since the default is forced for every client and there's nothing to stop everyone else from picking a worse thumbnail just because it picks whever you happen to be in the video when you edit it --- and it being a crowdsourced extension means that more often than not the thumbnails are an out of context or blurry mess. not to mention people editorializing the titles or overly sanatizing them.
e: thanks for the reply - guess i was blind due to the extension being tucked away in the 'more extensions' thing. still annoying that its default behaviour though, especially the thumbnail thing. surely picking a random motion blurred time is more detrimental than a potentially clickbaity thumbnail?
forcing titlecase is obnoxious, really wish there was a toggle for that as it kinda steamrolls the grammar/form of other languages just because they happen to use the latin script (!) or stylistic choices for the video title.
also by default it seems to choose your current position in the video as the new thumbnail even if you haven't explicitly picked it - a lot of times results in people removing an okay thumbnail and it getting replaced with motionblurred nonsense.
i know it sounds petty but if these are my only two bits of feedback then it must be good !Developer response
posted 2 years agoPlease check the options, there are options related to all these things. You can even configure things like formatting to be different for specific channels - Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 15923203, 2 years agoGreat 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 2 years agoEdit: 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!