Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
265 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by lambda99, 2 months agoAwesome addon, but I'd love to have an easier way to add a channel (or even a video) to the allowlist directly from the youtube page without having to open the settings in a separate tab.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Blitz, 2 months agoAmazing extension. It basically transformed my YouTube into something that doesn't look like it's aimed for 5 year olds with a chronic clicking addiction. It genuinely reminds me of old YouTube... you know, back when it actually worked. However, right now it seems like on most pages, especially if there are a lot of videos on screen, it takes a second to load all the thumbnails and titles. It makes sense as it's fetching data from the server(s). But it does mean that your internet should be somewhat decent, and so does your CPU. Keep those things in mind. Fortunately, you can quickly turn the extension on and off to test things out.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Nerthazul, 3 months agoIt depends on users for its functionality so it can sometimes be a bit lackluster in title coverage. But mostly it works really well and gives to the point video titles.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Klementine Des Pêches, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 12567334, 3 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by inb4nope, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Ethan Olson, 3 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Michael Washboard, 3 months agoIt's good, but haven't tested it for too long. I use this extension as a back-up for videos with click-bait or sensationalized titles I want a alternative to, and do not use its titles and thumbnails as the default way to look at YouTube videos. The descriptive titles act more like titles to scientific papers in their betrayal of the contents of the video. It is of my opinion that titles of educational videos should be more descriptive and long. Artistic titles, and titles that have metaphors should have titles keep its integrity, and skits, artistic video strictly for non-informative entertainment shouldn't be changed.
But, a compromise should be reached for the people who think some ""REDDITORS'"" title changes are UNNECESSARY EARTH SHATTERING RUINING YouTube⸮, to these people I say look at your setting: "Behaviors > Default to Original Video Information" will make it opt-in, and you could only look at the DeArrow version when you want a more descriptive title. I also detest that asking users to pay for software that heavily relies on data hosted on a server is being called "shady", as you are normalizing developers being under funded enough to not be able to support their software. Servers cost money = server needs funding -> people unwilling to pay = hard to keep servers running/cost comes out of dev's pocket. With all of that out of the way, This is an biased review based on my use-case, but so was theirs, so now we get both sides of the coin.
A feature I personally think would be nice to add — but of course not mandatory — is a 70%-80% democratic vote for if a video is plagiarized, with a attached source to accompany it. This would greatly help push for more accountability within the "video essay" and "educational" online sphere. - Rated 4 out of 5by shiny-airplane, 3 months agoIt worked fine for me in the last months that I had it, but recently it stopped working. It started to only change the titles, but most original thumbnails were still there. I reinstalled it, and still the same. I was wondering if they were crowd sourced thumbnails, but they always just seem to be the same thumbnail as the original. Didnt change anything either in my firefox and addon settings, so don't know why it stopped working. Maybe youtube updated something recently... :(
Developer response
posted 3 months agoTry going to DeArrow options -> Backup/Restore -> Reset Settings to Default - Rated 1 out of 5by Greg, 3 months agoA 6-hour trial? This is ridiculous! I installed it, came back the next day to test it, and it says my trial expired. Now I have to wait for approval for free access? This is so unprofessional. Making it free from the start with an option for payment later would be a better approach. I'm really fed up with all the paywalls on Firefox extensions recently! Hopefully, Mozilla will sort out this marketing mess soon!
Developer response
posted 3 months agoYou can do as many trials as you want. Just click start trial again
Edit: Looks like there was a bug making it not appear, this is now fixed - Rated 1 out of 5by nakata1912, 3 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18555405, 3 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.
Developer response
posted 3 months agoYou can use DeArrow for free, forever, by clicking "I can't/don't want to pay"- Rated 5 out of 5by fantoski, 4 months agoGenuinely a life changer, I don't see myself using YouTube without it, and there's a surprisingly great amount of community-generated titles and thumbnails available.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18531721, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by fishy, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Mewier, 4 months agoTried it for a couple of days and ended up buying it. It's a bit slow when loading the thumbnails, when opening my subscriptions it takes about 6 seconds for everything to load. But it's worth it, I love it, it removes the sensationalism.
- Rated 4 out of 5by MrX, 4 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by 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.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. - Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18514343, 4 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 5 out of 5by Tanvir, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by TheCraiggers, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Jakk, 4 months agoFantastic, completely non-intrusive. It's nice actually knowing what certain videos are going to be about before clicking them.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14425985, 4 months agoWorth the dollar. When videos are missing submissions I feel compelled to add one.