Technology

One of the best addons you can get. Period.

It's like a paradigm shift when you browse YouTube after enabling it.

This plus using ublock to remove useless UI elements makes for a prime disenshittified YouTube experience.

The way some of the titles are changed is quite funny to me. It's like if you saw a big scary looking ghost on Halloween and then you rip the sheet off and it's just Huey, Dewey and Louie stacked on top of each other.

I Bought Ten of the WEIRDEST Phones EVER

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Reviewing Old Phones with Alternative Form Factors

Pretty solid extension. It's wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.

I’ve been using this for a while now and the only thing I’ll say is that a lot of videos don’t have alternative titles, so since it’s all crowd sourced I feel that the best solution is to have more people using it.

Brilliant idea regardless.

I used this within smart tube for a while, but honestly I kind of missed some of the clockbait titles. There problem I faced was that it wasn't clear when a title had been replaced or not, so when you did find a video with a relatively clockbait titles, it gave you a bit of a false sense of security. I also found that sometimes the crowd sourced titles were just boring, albeit accurate.

Maybe I'm just weird or maybe I've just been browsing YouTube for so long that I'm used to it, but for now it's an addon I'll skip, though I'm very glad it exists.

A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube

It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.

It doesn't change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.

I haven't used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.

When you browse Netflix, they use different thumbnails for the movies depending on the profile they've made for you. Even if it's as blatant as "white person from the movie"/"black person from the movie". If you ignore a movie for long enough, sometimes they even swap it out for a different image to trick you into watching it.

I'm amazed that YouTube doesn't try and do this somehow. Instead, every video somehow has the same stupid thumbnails of arrows, meaningless text and gormless faces, and I hate it.

But then I block all ads anyway, so it may be that they're actively trying to make me go away.

I like the concept and I have it installed, but I don't contribute to it because I find it challenging to think of better titles. It's not easy like with Sponsorblock that I regularly submit to. For example, sometimes I need to watch most of the video first to be accurate, and by then I've already moved on to the next video. Other times it's simply hard for me to condense the content of the video accurately into so many characters when the original title is way off.

I do like the way it makes all the titles lowercase, though. I find that changes the tone of the video feed quite a bit.

The problem I have with dearrow is that it's editorialising and arbitrary. It's not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that's it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There's a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn't like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it's not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don't understand the creative process.

I find YouTube itself to be so adversarial that I don't even use it anymore.

Still, I'm installing both this and SponsorBlock to symbolically show support to this of projects that IMHO show that I want the Web MY way. I don't want to browse in whatever way maximizes attention and distraction to increase profit margin of surveillance capitalism.

I wished this morning existed way before it was out. I have been using it from day 1. I love it.

Love it. While not all titles get replaced (crowd sourced) just the fact that the thumbnails get normalized is enough for it to be worth it.

I like the concept and generally it works well, unfortunately I've had to disable it because of how sluggish it can make a lot of pages feel. The playlist view in particular becomes hard to use when the extension is enabled.

Hopefully they fix stuff like that longer term so I can turn it back on.

It will eventually find issues with malicious users but for now, it’s an incredible concept.

Now that's something interesting. Does it work with piped?

People are going at great length to work around the cancer that is youtube. It's a nice idea, but in the end, only a boycott will work.

That example, losing the artwork of the Kurzgesagt videos is pretty bad though.

Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.

my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!