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.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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- uBlock Origin
- DeArrow
- Sponsorblock
- Return YouTube Dislike
Or for everything built-in: Piped
Don't forget Enhancer for Youtube. A metric ton of Youtube customizations and quality of life features, also includes disabling shorts or converting them into the standard Youtube video format.
Sounds like piped also has most of that. As a bonus, piped requires no account, no addons and no direct connection to google.
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You convinced me, I'm totally adding this today! :)
I also would throw in sponsorblock to that too - it skips all the "but first, Raid Shadow Legends..." "don't forget to like share and subscribe" nonsense :)
edit: thank you, I just poked into YouTube Revanced, and found DeArrow was on! This explains why I didn't like youtube's content when on my PC, so I'll 100% be adding this to Firefox! :)
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Using uBlock Origin to get rid of the Youtube Shorts section of the sub feed was amazing for me. Are there other things you block too?
Here's a non exhaustive list of things I've blocked:
- The pill strip on top with a list of video topics (don't know what the official term is.)
- YouTube shorts suggestions.
- Ads that are injected into the suggestions.
- "Shorts remixing this video" section in the video descriptions.
I'll perhaps share my ublock filter list for YouTube later.
Edit: My uBlock Origin filters:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-feed-nudge-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com###voice-search-button
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##yt-related-chip-cloud-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytd-ad-slot-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-structured-description-content-renderer.style-scope
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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
to
Reviewing Old Phones with Alternative Form Factors
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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.
I turn it off and on to see which changed. An indicator would be nice. Maybe an icon that I can hover over to reveal the original thumbnail and title.
I get where you are coming from. If I follow a channel then I already get a feel of what the content will be even if the title or/thumbnail is clickbait. Also you lose part of the channel's charm. Exaggerations can be really funny.
It works a lot better for the trending section for unknown channels.
The icon and hover to reveal previous title has been available in the extension for a long while.
Sorry. I was using it with Freetube, not the extension.
Thank you for pointing that out.
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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.
De arrow also lets you do those things and customize which of them it always does.
It's also the same guy that does sponsor block :)
Not trying to steer people away from yours, it's good to have alternatives, just sharing the info
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'm amazed that YouTube doesn't try and do this somehow.
They do. They even give the creator statistics on which thumbnail generated more clicks (completely ignoring other factors so it's a misleading metric anyway).
There's no active a/b testing though. The creators have to specifically change the thumbnail for everyone at once. From what I understand.
No they can a b test so some people will get one version and other people will get the other version and whichever version becomes the most popular is the version that everyone gets.
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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.
This might actually be one of the few things AI could be used for. ChatGPT could download the transcript and just build a short summary.
Although chances are you're just replacing one shitty thing with a different shitty thing.
YouTube has already been helpful to a degree. Sometimes I'll open their AI summarize and it will give all the details along with timestamps. There are videos where I saw the summary and passed on watching because the video was mostly filler material.
Yeah, I think there was something like that floating around. I imagine it's costly, though, but it'd be nice to have.
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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 agree. I think what you describe is also seen in sponsor block.
People mark story telling videos mostly as filler content, so a beautiful 10 minute video is chopped down to only a minute or two and most of what makes the video great is removed.
Live music sets where people segment out the intro and outro to songs, so tracks are mashed together for a non-stop music experience, which I think misses the mark with live music.
I also find a lot of sponsor segments are done quite badly like the person who made them doesn't care or is in a rush. Eg. Today I came a sponsor segment that started 11 seconds too early. I only recognised it because it kicked in half way through a sentence.
Don't get me wrong, I still use the extension; I've just disabled most of the auto actions.
Many moons ago I tried Darrow for a day and got the same feeling as what your described. I decided the original video titles are superior and disabled the extension.
yeah, I've got it set to off by default. i used it almost like a spoiler tag. click the button to see the answer to "THIS AMAZING DEVICE DOES WHAT????"
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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.
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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.
I've been using this extension for over a year now. The only malicious use I've seen has been petty.
Occasionally see a video from a controversial creator titled something like "Asshole talks about stupid bullshit for 25 minutes" on fresh uploads.
The titles do change quite a bit. A lot of my title suggestions were changed/improved by others.
There's a voting system, so you'd need a big group of bad actors fighting uphill for something that isn't really all that worth it.
That example, losing the artwork of the Kurzgesagt videos is pretty bad though.
Is it? The original artwork was fairly clickbaity imo.
This is my biggest challenge with this extension. What's clickbait to one person is not to another. Several times I've come across titles that get mangled when rewritten to lose key points. Or the image gets replaced with a random screen grab. There's a difference between somebody doing the YouTube face and a title with "the craziest stunt you've ever seen" and an artist photo with a title saying the "a crazy stunt jump through a burning hoop". I'm okay with the latter but dearrow will often remove crazy. The is just an contrived example
One person could still say "crazy" makes it clickbait, but having some adjectives are fine
It replaces it with the much more pleasing artwork from the actual video. Someone has gone through and picked nice frames for many of those videos.
my YouTube watch time drastically reduced after getting this extension. great addon!
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.
Sad it does not support Invidious. Else I would be using it.
Now that's something interesting. Does it work with piped?
Not sure, but other alternatives do embrace it. I use FreeTube, and it has a built in function to use DeArrow. I'm loving it so far.
Hmm I wasn't aware it "fixes" titles as well... I am using it on Smart Tube to have better thumbnails, do I have to activate this myself to correct titles as well?
Anyway 99% of my ST usage (aside watching videos, as in, adding stuff to watch later) comes from my Shield TV home screen, I add stuff there to "My List" Shield row based on my recommendations row... And I am pretty sure DeArrow does not work there, only within the app :/
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