Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
Review by Bobby
Rated 1 out of 5
by Bobby, 3 years agoEDIT: I'm curious why the developer has intentionally decide to get the extension to make changes where no changes are required - especially since it provides a worse user experience with YouTube. They haven't explained the licencing...
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People needlessly change titles and thumbnails for no reason, not to mention they do so incorrectly most of the time.
Eg.
Titles: brand and product names have a specific capitalization set by the brand and product owners but people will change it to something else. People will also randomly capitalize random words in the title.
Thumbnails: thumbnails show exactly what the video is about and they use the correct words to describe it exactly. People will change it to a random thumbnail.
If people can't get the fundamentals right, then why would i trust the extension to actually correct a misleading/clickbait title and thumbnail.
Like SponsorBlock, there is no quality control. Anyone can submit any garbage and everyone else just has to put up with it. There is no method to hide submissions by those who submit garbage.
Furthermore, why does the extension require a paid licence?! People contribute towards the extension for free. Are you seriously planning to do a rug pull on those that add value to the extension.
Sure you're giving out free licences right now, but when will that change?
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People needlessly change titles and thumbnails for no reason, not to mention they do so incorrectly most of the time.
Eg.
Titles: brand and product names have a specific capitalization set by the brand and product owners but people will change it to something else. People will also randomly capitalize random words in the title.
Thumbnails: thumbnails show exactly what the video is about and they use the correct words to describe it exactly. People will change it to a random thumbnail.
If people can't get the fundamentals right, then why would i trust the extension to actually correct a misleading/clickbait title and thumbnail.
Like SponsorBlock, there is no quality control. Anyone can submit any garbage and everyone else just has to put up with it. There is no method to hide submissions by those who submit garbage.
Furthermore, why does the extension require a paid licence?! People contribute towards the extension for free. Are you seriously planning to do a rug pull on those that add value to the extension.
Sure you're giving out free licences right now, but when will that change?
Developer response
posted 3 years agoResponse to edit:
The defaults are chosen in the way that I, and many others, like to use the extension. They are on the aggressive side, but that's why I made the extension so customizable. There are numerous options to turn down the aggressiveness, and you can configure all of these options per channel to be able to be aggressive with some channels, but less aggressive with others.
People have different opinions on what they like, I personally like all titles auto formatted and having all thumbnails replaced.
About the license, there will always be a free option, and all license keys are unlimited use, so you can use them on new devices and you can even share it with your friends.
I promise to never remove this, and I wouldn't want to do this anyway, as I want as many people to using DeArrow as possible, as that's how crowdsourced extensions works.
The soft-ish paywall acts as an aggressive donation barrier convincing a few people to donate, but still allowing everyone else to use the extension with all it's features just like anyone else. It is not meant to restrict who is using the extension. Only a certain amount of people need to pay to make it work.
Thanks to the paywall system, I am now earning enough money that I will be able to work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow full time when I graduate school in January and I am very much looking forward to that :)
Original Response:
I think you are misunderstanding some parts of the extension. The things you are talking about are not human submissions, but configurable automatic systems enabled by default.
By default, it auto-formats titles if no user submission exists. These are not submitted by users, but an automatic formatting system. You can change how this auto-formatting works in the options and also disable it.
By default, it shows a random screenshot from the videos from thumbnails if there is no human submission. You can also configure this in settings if you don't like that behavior, or disable thumbnail replacements altogether if that's not your thing.
Lastly, it is not possible for me to "rug-pull", as the code is open source under a copy-left license, and the database is publicly downloadable, and several other people are actively mirroring this data.
Hope that makes things clearer :)
The defaults are chosen in the way that I, and many others, like to use the extension. They are on the aggressive side, but that's why I made the extension so customizable. There are numerous options to turn down the aggressiveness, and you can configure all of these options per channel to be able to be aggressive with some channels, but less aggressive with others.
People have different opinions on what they like, I personally like all titles auto formatted and having all thumbnails replaced.
About the license, there will always be a free option, and all license keys are unlimited use, so you can use them on new devices and you can even share it with your friends.
I promise to never remove this, and I wouldn't want to do this anyway, as I want as many people to using DeArrow as possible, as that's how crowdsourced extensions works.
The soft-ish paywall acts as an aggressive donation barrier convincing a few people to donate, but still allowing everyone else to use the extension with all it's features just like anyone else. It is not meant to restrict who is using the extension. Only a certain amount of people need to pay to make it work.
Thanks to the paywall system, I am now earning enough money that I will be able to work on SponsorBlock and DeArrow full time when I graduate school in January and I am very much looking forward to that :)
Original Response:
I think you are misunderstanding some parts of the extension. The things you are talking about are not human submissions, but configurable automatic systems enabled by default.
By default, it auto-formats titles if no user submission exists. These are not submitted by users, but an automatic formatting system. You can change how this auto-formatting works in the options and also disable it.
By default, it shows a random screenshot from the videos from thumbnails if there is no human submission. You can also configure this in settings if you don't like that behavior, or disable thumbnail replacements altogether if that's not your thing.
Lastly, it is not possible for me to "rug-pull", as the code is open source under a copy-left license, and the database is publicly downloadable, and several other people are actively mirroring this data.
Hope that makes things clearer :)
371 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 17842467, 10 days agoI don't understand installing it and subsequently leaving a negative review for the fact that it does what it says, or for the $1 dollar payment that you *don't have to pay.* That said, this is often broken and may not always be as useful as you'd think (people like to inject their opinions into the new titles for example; this is often fixed eventually but it's kinda irritating when bad titles stay up). You can just go through the settings to limit or remove title changes, though.
Edit: Re-read what I said, this is a pretty neutral review -- unchanged by your response.Developer response
posted 8 hours agoIf it's still not working for you, try making sure it's not asking for extra permissions. You can go to about:addons, and click the gear icon and click "Check for updates". If there is a popup in the top right asking for permissions to access dearrow.ajay.app (the DeArrow homepage), click "Update" - Rated 5 out of 5by Penny, 14 days agoBig fan of this extension, occasionally youtube will make changes and break it, but it is always back working pretty quickly
- Rated 5 out of 5by Aaron, 16 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 19858893, 19 days ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Fledrox, 21 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by DrWhoFan13, 21 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by SDM, 22 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by mguia, 23 days agoIts crazy how an app that supposedly is against preadatory marketing has such a predatory and cynicala monetization strategy of promising to be free while its not
Developer response
posted 22 days agoHi, it's not meant to be predatory, and does not promise to be free. It is a paid extension that allows most people to use it for free if they choose - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14902700, 24 days agoGreat extension, can't imagine my life without it now.
But just yesterday it stopped working. First the button to show original video title and thumbnail disappeared and now all titles and thumbnails are original clickbaity ones. Changing any settings in the extension or restarting it doesn't help sadly :(
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Reinstalling the extension fixed the issueDeveloper response
posted 24 days agoHi, this was fixed in version 2.3.4 which has now been reviewed by Mozilla so you should be able to just update
Edit: they made another change, it's fixed in 2.3.4. If you don't want to wait for Mozilla to review it, you can install the beta by clicking "FirefoxSignedInstaller" on https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/releases/tag/2.3.5 - Rated 1 out of 5by bnvnnchgcccc, a month agochanges titles that dont need to be changed at all, and it changes them to a longer much worse version of the same title. the original was already descriptive, useless app, terrible user titles
Developer response
posted 25 days agoYou can try enabling "casual mode" to keep the funny or interesting titles, or use the "default to original information" button to only see the custom title if you click a button - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 19218008, a month ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Aleksandersen, 2 months agoInteresting concept, but the extension frequently breaks YouTube — images and features fail to load every few weeks until you disable this extension.
Developer response
posted 2 months agoAt the moment, sometimes the first recommended video will be blank. There is an update to fix this, but it is currently still being reviewed by Mozilla. You can install the beta version by clicking the "FirefoxSignedInstaller" on https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow/releases/tag/2.3 - Rated 5 out of 5by Alise, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Dilum Perera, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18863959, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Al3415, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Jorb, 3 months agoUsed to be amazing. Now with the latest Youtube changes it's very inconsistent. Most videos that use to have custom names and thumbnails no longer do, and only a few here and there still have them. The majority of videos also don't even allow you to submit new titles anymore, the textboxes to do so are absent.
Developer response
posted 2 months agoHi, is this still happening to you? Could you send a screenshot to dev @ ajay.app - Rated 1 out of 5by Samg381, 3 months agoThe payment scheme is as deceptive and scummy as the clickbait this extension seeks to fix. I have never seen something as bizarre as this.
Developer response
posted 2 months agoDeArrow is a paid extension, but I understand not everyone wants to or can pay, so you can use it for free by clicking "I don't want to pay" or sending me an email for a free key
Or even using a good ole keygen website lol https://ashleygraves.eu/dearrow/ - Rated 5 out of 5by Anderson, 3 months agoThis is so great! Thank you for making this and helping fight back against all the attention-grabbing. I love that the thumbnails can be set to just show a random screenshot from the video. It gives me a much better idea of what the video actually is rather than relying on the overly-clickbait-y thumbnails. The search results page feels much calmer (and actually reminds me of the early youtube days).
- Rated 1 out of 5by penny, 3 months agoThe settings are not nearly granular enough for me to customize this experience to my liking, and the style that the community has decided to adopt is not *descriptive* it's *verbose*. Concise language, emotive language, evocative language are not bad things, inherently. Videos from some of my favorite channels were unrecognizable and significantly worse.
I wish I could say this could be solved by creating a "blacklist" mode, where only specific, named, egregious channels I select would have their titles and thumbnails replaced, but I installed this in order to scrub the obnoxious titles and thumbnails that Veritasium loves to use, but the community suggested replacement for one Veritasium video was so much *less* clear and descriptive than the original that it completely defeats the point.
I wasn't bothered by the request for payment, since it took me significantly less than the six hours of the free trial to realize this wasn't for me. Additionally, unlike some people, I recognize FOSS development is labor and deserves to be paid. I just wish people realized that also applied to those who script, film, edit, and design thumbnails for videos on Youtube.Developer response
posted 2 months agoSorry about that, unfortunately the titles aren't for everyone and can be too descriptive sometimes for sure. I suggest enabling "Default to Original Video Information" - Rated 5 out of 5by Poligraf Poligrafovich Bouboulov, 3 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by NonOfYourBiz, 3 months agotrying to coax users to donate money, 'wait 12h until we activate it :)' and when you click 'i wanna pay but cant' it works right away.
SCUMMY! WE DONT LIKE PEOPLE LIKE YOUDeveloper response
posted 2 months agoIt's a paid extension, but I don't want to limit people who cannot or do not want to pay from using it. So, you can use it for free by clicking that you don't want to pay, or emailing me asking for a key :) - Rated 5 out of 5by mobile, 3 months agoI've used this extension everyday without noticing its effects, it probably has saved me a ton of time not getting duped by clickbaiters.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Valdemar_check, 4 months ago