Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
12 reviews
- Rated 3 out of 5by blackrose, 2 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Ad-Free Life, 2 months agoThis is an interesting compromise. I think I'll keep using it, because it makes the recommendations/searches a lot more relaxing to look at. But the downside is making videos seem better than they are, because if the title and thumbnail are bad, the video itself probably is too, and this hides that signal. I haven't been using it all that long and there's already been a couple times when I've really hated a video, then looked at the original title and thumbnail and realised that I wouldn't have clicked on it if I wasn't using DeArrow. It does prevent videos from lying about their contents in the title, so it may well save time overall. There's a deep problem with Youtube that is probably impossible to patch over with a browser extension, and this is still a useful tool.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Anonymous, 4 months agoEdit: I don't mind if the reminder appears every single time, as long as I have to only confirm once (1 button). But, I don't care how many times the 5 confirmations thing appears, if it does, I'll just cancel. It's THAT annoying to me.
While, I do like this extension. I dislike the new change of having to confirm 5 times before I can submit an altered title. This is significantly detract me from even bothering, it's too much hassle. A single confirmation should be enough to get the message across.Developer response
posted 4 months agoThe guidelines reminder does not appear for every submission
It appears the first time you submit, once more a day later, then three days later, then a week later, then once per month.
People have mentioned now knowing the rules thanks to this dialog so it does seem to be working to try to improve the titles being submitted
Edit: If you think it's too much effort to click a few checkmarks once a month, then yea, please don't submit. We do want people putting some level of effort when thinking of new titles - Rated 3 out of 5by Marc Kovka, 6 months agoThe thumbnails are sometimes bad chosen 😓 Maybe combine it with SponsorBlock's main point or most reviewed moment, etc.
Also I use Unhook (removes recommandations bar, etc.) but it conflicts 😩
Maybe also add this option to DeArrow 🥺
With all that, it would be a real 5 ⭐ extension 😁 - Rated 3 out of 5by Dishater, 8 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.Developer response
posted 7 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. - Rated 3 out of 5by Barrett Ray, 10 months agoNice extension. Docked a couple stars because the guideline to capitalize replacement titles like "a sentence" is ridiculous and looks horrible.
Please add an option to convert _only_ the replacement titles into "Title Case." Otherwise, normal titles containing phrases like "ABC" or "NASA" become "Abc" and "Nasa."
On the other hand, an option to make Title Case only affect lowercase words would be great.
Happy to send in a PR. Just let me know.Developer response
posted 10 months agoSubmitting a title in "sentence" form is explicitly for those cases. Also, "NASA" is on the list of allowed all caps words so should not be modified by the formatter.
If the title is formatted as a sentence, and some words are proper nouns, the extension will know not to force those to be lower case if someone chooses the sentence case option. If everyone submitted titles as "Title Case", then the extension would not know which words to leave with a capital and which not to for those that prefer sentence-like casing.
I think what you're looking for is a separate formatting option for original titles and submitted titles, which at the moment is not an option implemented - Rated 3 out of 5by MaxL, a year agoI like it in theory, but I am really, really, really not a huge fan of American English title case being enforced across all titles, even non-English ones (despite the setting that claims to not do this). I strongly believe the default setting should a conversion to sentence case.
Developer response
posted a year agoYou should be able to change the title formatting option to sentence case. For people with browser languages that are not english, it defaults to sentence case instead of title case for this reason. - Rated 3 out of 5by expertmax, a year agoI had to modify the source code to get the plugin to work without the paywall.
The introduction page says to click on the button at the bottom of the page to activate the extension for free (I don't want to pay) but there is no button to be found. There is the before/after image and that's about it.Developer response
posted a year agoHere is a key: FRIqr-98fe2
Here's an image of where the button is: https://ibb.co/r7ZfwnB - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 18143422, a year agoWith this on, home and some other pages often show nothing but an "you're offline" YouTube message. Will remove this and put 5 when it'll be fixed. I paid for this
Developer response
posted a year agoThis sounds like an issue caused by your ad blocker. Try uninstalling all ad blockers installing ublock origin, and following ublock's instructions
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/20586
Remove custom filters and update
You can email me for further help dev @ ajay.app - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 15007095, 2 years agoUnfortunately it conflicts with "BlockTube", which is number 2 priority addon for me for youtube (3 is being SponsorBlock), so i have to disable it for now. But otherwise it's pretty good so far.
Reply (12.07):
I think i mostly have the default settings, but to be fair, its kind of a little buggy addon by itself, and i never found any better alternative.
It did work ok 3-4 days before that (ignoring the thumbnail and general lag), but after that some videos just suddenly stopped playing altogether, and other ones break mid-play, and disabling "dearrow" instantly stopped all of it.Developer response
posted 2 years agoInteresting, it shouldn't. Are there specific settings you have enabled in BlockTube that conflict?
Edit: oh that's a separate issue, but that should be fixed now