Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
273 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by lily, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Leo, 3 months agoAs someone who is possible Neurodivergent, I would like to thank you SO MUCH for this add-on
I have been using it for 1 Month now and it solve my major issues that has been plaguing Youtube!
The Clickbaits and Extremely Vague Tittles in the style of "The x situation is y" "It's Over" "The x thing you will never y" "This x thing changed my life" "Buzzword Buzzword Sloppy Clickbait" 😵💫
Clickbait? More like Click-REPEL!
In fact, a channel I used to be subscribed is more tolerable now with this addition because the Add-on tells me what the subject of the video is instead of vague posting titles and having all the freaking thumbnails being the guy's face! 😩
The Final Straw of me installing this was a video I watched with a friend online.
It was a 20 minutes long about an Xbox 360 game that stole assets from Nintendo... only for it to reveal it halfway the video it was a Fire Emblem sprite... - Rated 5 out of 5by Cameri, 3 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Hugglesthemerciless, 3 months agoJust had today's Formula 1 race spoiled because DeArrow put the race results as the thumbnail for the race highlights vid instead of leaving the original alone. Never using this garbage again.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Marc Kovka, 3 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 5 out of 5by Twurl, 3 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Braix, 3 months agoI feel that this goes way too overboard with its definition of clickbait and ends up compromising the artistic intent of some channels. I specifically noticed this on ahoy's channel, where the movie poster like thumbnails and simple names were replaced with lesser quality images and verbose titles. The p90 one specifically is a good example. I could go through and edit the channel specific settings for channels I already know and like, but I fear I could then miss out on channels I have not seen before are. I feel like I would like this extension if there was maybe an option for affecting purely egregious forms of clickbait rather than almost anything that seems eye catching to someone.
Developer response
posted 3 months agoWe do have an exemption for fiction pieces such as short films, but one downside of this extension is that it will end up removing some artistic, and the line of what people think is good vs. bad is really subjective from the many discussions we've had about this.
For now, channel allowlisting is the best you can do, but maybe in the future we can try to make a way to share lists with others so you could follow and contribute to shared lists with people that have similar views. If you have other ideas I would be interested to hear on our discord/matrix. - Rated 4 out of 5by lambda99, 4 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, 4 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, 4 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, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 12567334, 4 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by inb4nope, 4 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Ethan Olson, 4 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Michael Washboard, 4 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, 4 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 4 months agoTry going to DeArrow options -> Backup/Restore -> Reset Settings to Default - Rated 1 out of 5by Greg, 4 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 4 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, 4 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 18555405, 4 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 4 months agoYou can use DeArrow for free, forever, by clicking "I can't/don't want to pay"- Rated 5 out of 5by fantoski, 5 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, 5 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by fishy, 5 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Mewier, 5 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.