Reviews for DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube
DeArrow - Better Titles and Thumbnails on YouTube by Ajay (SponsorBlock)
272 reviews
- Rated 1 out of 5by FF user 17083219, 7 months agowhat the addon description purposefully omits, is the crucial fact that you cannot in fact use the addon at all, even if you cannot pay. i clicked that option and its still asking me to pay, or wait for a multitude of hours. What is the reason for this other than to annoy and coerce the user? absolute garbage and greed.
Developer response
posted 7 months agoYou can use it for free after waiting a few hours if you do not want or cannot pay, and while waiting, you can use the free trial. - Rated 4 out of 5by Bakaba, 7 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17476401, 8 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Speedy, 8 months agoIt's a fine extension, it does what it is supposed to do however the concept gets ruined by moronic title edits made by idiots. So often I see fine, non-problematic titles being replaced with a non-descriptive mess. Important/valuable information gets removed for the sake of being changed, and I end up thinking "who thought this edit would be a good idea?" so often.
For example, this video:
"BETA SQUAD MAFIA GAME FT DEJI (CHILLI FORFEIT)"
gets changed to:
"Mafia E11"
whereas a better title would be:
"Beta Squad: Mafia E11 ft. Deji"
Here's another stupid change on a video from Techquickie:
Original: "Why do speakers hiss?"
Replaced: "speaker Noise: Hiss and Hum"
I try using the voting feature to downvote the awful new titles / I try to submit my own but I have no idea if it does anything as I never see anything change. The thumbs up/down emoji does a twirl and there's no indication if it did anything or what it does. This panel really needs some improvement. - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18403227, 8 months agoKNOW BEFORE BUYING:
Don't expect a name to change. In practice, there was a 1% or less change in the names of videos I watched. Enabling DeArrow mostly changed capitalization.
Re-titles are user-submitted only. There will be NO title change unless a user has submitted one.Developer response
posted 8 months agoYou can use the trial to see how much coverage the types of videos you watch have, or share it around with others with similar interests to you to spread it in that community :) - Rated 5 out of 5by Bee, 8 months agoThis makes YouTube an infinitely better user experience! I really appreciate the lack of visual clutter all the loud thumbnails cause especially. It does make my subscriptions & home page load a little more slowly, but that's well worth it in my opinion.
For some channels I'm subscribed to (like crochet/craft channels), I found I missed the thumbnails because those show the finished craft product, thankfully it was easy to whitelist those.
I did also change the default thumbnail replacement from "random" to "auto-generated by YouTube", which led to less awkward half-blink faces in my feed.
Once activated, the extension immediately worked on all my devices where I'm logged in to Firefox, and I was able to re-use the activation code on a shared family device where I am not logged in on my Firefox account. Overall, a great experience and well worth the 1 euro.Developer response
posted 8 months ago> One minor negative is that in some interfaces (like browsing a channel's videos) the blue logo button doesn't work to view the original title/thumbnail, because it will open the video link instead.
Hmm, maybe that is because of a new YouTube layout. I'll look into it. - Rated 1 out of 5by Chloe, 8 months agodoesn't work, random thumbnails are showing up completely unchanged. shame that this extension used to work and is now utterly broken
Developer response
posted 8 months agoSend me an email and I can try to help you trouble shoot: dev @ ajay.app
You could also try uninstalling and reinstalling in case it was a config change that caused it - Rated 3 out of 5by Barrett Ray, 8 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 8 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 4 out of 5by Iceyhammer, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Frans, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by cyber, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by aNkIt9607, 8 months agoLoved this one. I recommend to everyone to use this extension to save yourself from clickbats thumbnail
- Rated 1 out of 5by Kirby, 8 months agoomg all the video thumbnails just flicker non stop and slows/freezes the whole browser
Developer response
posted 8 months agoDo you maybe have another extension that affects YouTube thumbnails? - Rated 5 out of 5by Caio, 8 months agoPaid extension? I am not buying anything!
EDIT: Is it donationware? I will test it, maybe I can make a contribution. - Rated 1 out of 5by intars, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by LolZoide, 8 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by MaxL, 8 months 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 8 months 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 5 out of 5by Wally, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by z-, 8 months agoIncredible work by the same creator as SponsorBlock. I feel such a hatred towards clickbait because I know what I'm interested in, and I will click on those videos but I hate it when I feel the rug has been pulled from me (even though my investment may only be a minute). Also, it's difficult to re-find a video when the video isn't just titled what it's about.
Ajay is the person to do this correct. Ignore the 1 star reviews they're by people who don't want to pay $1 (single time donation) even though you can just not pay, but do pay and let this important service have a chance of surviving.
Ajay, you should set up a Patreon or something tho, SponsorBlock has a huge number of users and I really want to see this and that be around long term.Developer response
posted 8 months agothanks :)
sponsorblock and dearrow are definitely here for the long term, but the best way I've tried to ensure that is by making sure all submissions are downloadable and archived at https://sponsor.ajay.app/database making sure that the projects can be quickly taken over by another responsible person if something does go wrong - Rated 2 out of 5by Stoia, 8 months agoThe idea is quite nice! Giving some method of controlling clickbait is a good idea, the issue is that the "community" contributing these titles are pedantic nerds. (I say this as a pedantic nerd myself.)
Completely fine titles are being replaced with weirdly specific descriptions, take for example this XKCD Video title:
"What if everyone jumped at once?"
is replaced by:
"What if everyone was magically teleported to the same place on earth, then all jumped at once?"
This doesnt add _anything_ other then make the title three times as long and more confusing. Its also addressed that "everyone in the same place" is meant when jumping within literally the first frame of the video.
So while its a good plugin in itself, due to reliance on Crowdsource, its absolutely not anything you can daily drive.Developer response
posted 8 months agoWe do allow open ended questions under the guidelines for this type of video. But yea, some people like to submit pedantic stuff... Feel free to downvote and report so we can send them warnings or bans - Rated 5 out of 5by Ajue, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by nintendogamer15, 8 months agoSuper cool idea for an extension. Some reviews are ragging on it for it being (optionally) paid, which is kind of silly. Dude has made YouTube much, much more bearable. He deserves your dollar.
- Rated 5 out of 5by John, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13908055, 8 months agoLove this addon and SponsorBlock! You don't need to pay for it but I did anyway because I really appreciate the work the dev is doing to improve YouTube and save my mental health from OTT clickbait. This addon works great and I'm glad that it takes community submissions to help make the extension even better and get better video coverage! Thanks Ajay!