DeArrow - A Browser Extension that removes clickbait titles and thumbnails

Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 252 points – 1 years ago

DeArrow - A Browser Extension for Better Titles and Thumbnails

dearrow.ajay.app

The creators of SponsorBlock did it again, now we can crowdsource better titles and thumbnails as well. I just tried it with LinusTechTips who is a worst offender when it comes to clickbait and its really great.

Compare without DeArrow

and with the extension

Clickbait has this singular capacity to make one feel treated as a simple primate. Such a relieving comparison.

Holy shit! This is amazing! But how will I ever know what's REALLY IMPORTANT without ALL CAPS and a shitton of BANGS?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Don't forget the USELESS FUCKING ARROWS.

Unless it's pointing to a red circle.

I've already noticed a couple videos where the corrected title made me more interested in the video than the clickbait title. Hope this extension takes off!

That’s how it is most of the time for me. I unsubbed from LTT because their clickbaity videos made it hard for me to see what I’m interested in. With this extension I might actually start watching their stuff again.

The removal of the custom thumbnail is refreshing. No more wired reactions with an arrow pointing at something.

I'm going to give this a try. The sponsorblock people have great ideas!

If I still used YT's main front-end, this would've been great.

SponsorBlock has been added to alternative frontends as well, so there is a good chance DeArrow will be ported.

That's what I'm hoping for!

What are you using? Freetube or something else?

I'm using an Invidious instance.

This made me realize how much I hate the YouTube metagame.

It would be awesome if this could be ported to ReVanced

I tried it. It works well. But, I don't think I will use it, because I usually know YouTubers to avoid when it comes to clickbaiting. Looking at you, Scotty Kilmer. :)

Feels like we're back on youtube in its early form, more organic. great idea i'm downloading it

Given that SponsorBlock is in Youtube ReVanced, do you think this will be included in ReVanced in the Future?

Your best bet is to ask developers yourself.

It seems no matter how many channels I block there's always more annoying eyesore thumbnails, so this is fantastic.

After Mastodon and Lemmy I think need a federated youtube alternative now too. Yes, I know PeerTube exists, I just need it to get a nice boost in attention just like the other got.

Video hosting is way more resource intensive (and therefore expensive) than text and even the most image filled of Lemmy communities

I know. They use peer-to-peer, hence the name PeerTube, that means while you are watching a video, you also upload that video for others to see. Granted the concept falls flat with so little users as there is never another person watching the exact same video at the exact same point it time, but in theory it should scale up.
I think we could also have a standalone desktop application to watch and seed. In the browser you stop seeding as soon as you close the tab, but with the desktop application you could allow for further seeding. People who want to keep the platform alive could practically donate their upstream traffic. I would.
I wish people would use it more cause I like the concept a lot.

I assume that in the short term transcoding is also going to become an issue. Most fedi servers are being hosted on cloud providers like Hetzner, DO, Linode, etc. who do not have any kind of encoding hardware, and modern codecs like VP9 or god forbid AV1 are horribly slow to encode without HW acceleration.

I know there are several platforms that do offer it (Amazon and Google do AFAIK) but those can still get pretty expensive, and there is a sizeable chunk of people here who may not want their content to reach Amazon or Google.

The concept still works with almost no users. If you're the only one watching a video, the original host is more than capable of serving it to you and so no need for extra peers ;).

Being able to handle a small amount of users isn't the problem, it's once a lot of users suddenly join in that the system would collapse without the peer functionality.

Also, peer tube is not fully decentralized. All videos need to be stored on an instance (similar to torrent seedboxes) so there will always be at least one direct source available. So I don't think that standalone app as you describe is needed. (That would be interesting though in a fully decentralized model, without any instances but all videos just floating between peers. But that would have the danger of creating dead videos similar to dead torrents)

This extension is free, forever, for anyone who installs it during the beta. Yes, that means there will be a paywall for new users only in the future, but I promise that there will still be a way to for people to get free access. Of course the extension will always remain fully open source, with a publicly downloadable database, just like SponsorBlock.

I'm a bit confused what this means / will mean. A paywall but also still alternative free access?

Where are you quoting this from? I could not find any information about a paywall.

mh, I can't find it anymore either. Pretty sure it was on the website, on the main page. Maybe it changed? Maybe it's now considered t obe out of beta?

I'm seeing it right now on the extension's welcoming page right after install

Yes, I also found it here. I have asked the developers for clarification.

I was also very unnerved to see this pop up for me today. Considering the extension is also basically just a ripoff of Clickbait Remover for Youtube, this really rubs me the wrong way.

DeArrow is in no way meant to be a rip off of "clickbait remover". It uses a completely different methods to retrieve thumbnails, using a thumbnail generation system instead of relying on "auto generated" thumbnails by YouTube.

You are right though that it is kind of made as that extension taken to the extreme.

I'd also like to clarify that the developer of "clickbait remover" contacted me and is very happy about my work. They also wished me luck on my soft-paywall plan.

Hi. What is the monetization plan for this addon exactly, and how much is it going to cost? If the addon is open source and the API hits are free, where does my money come in?

It will be similar to how the SponsorBlock "chapters" feature was handled, except also having a system for some people to get free access as well (most likely after waiting some time, or going through some queue of people wanting free access)

Chapters on SponsorBlock are now free, but on release, were behind a paywall on the extension only. It's simply a boolean that changes client side that enabled the functionality, so adds no privacy implications that an authenticated API would. The API is still free for others to implement with, such as on alternative clients, and in theory you could build the extension with the check commented out of course.

It'll most likely be priced the same as chapters was (5$) with past donators automatically getting free access. But I might choose a lower price too depending on how it goes.

So it'll just be a client side flag on the extension itself.

The plan for a alternative free access will most likely involve some form of waiting period or queue plus a sharing system. The code will also remain open source meaning there will always be a way :P

Awesome, it's like Clickbate Remover +.

If it works half as well as SponsorBlock I'll be a happy man.

I was genuinely surprised how well SponsorBlock works. I was assuming it to skip the sponsored sections only on accounts with millions of subscribers but in reality it almost never fails.

Honestly I'd probably be the type to be like "yeah I hate click bait!" Download this, and then stop watching videos entirely because they all look really boring

That's a win if you ask me.

There is also Clickbait Remover for Youtube. What are diferences?

This one will additionally use user submitted titles and thumbnails when available instead of just random ones.

When it removes the entirety of LTT from YouTube it will worth a try. There isn't much in this world that makes me seethe but that plonker is one.

I kinda like LTT materials, especially with Anthony but this extension is a godsend as I always hated their crappy thumbnails and titles.

It's Emily now if you did not know.

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware of that.

LTT makes good videos that are hidden behind obnoxious thumbnails. I hate how it's sometimes impossible to tell what a video is about because the title is so vague, but I understand why they do it. He has a company to run, he has employees to pay. He has said multiple times that he doesn't like it, but it would be a stupid to not do it because a bright colored thumbnail with a face going :O gets way more views than anything else. Clickbait haters are such a small minority that it's worth doing because 95% of people don't care

He has said multiple times that he doesn't like it, but it would be a stupid to not do it

Most youtubers don't like it, but the numbers don't lie: it works.

If your business model requires clicks and views, you are pretty much forced to do what is proven to work.

A few weeks ago they did a video about mech keyboards, without the face or clickbait title, and it was performing much worse after 3 days than even the daily video. The difference was in the hundreds of thousands of views.

Even now, it is one of the worst in terms of views from the past month (excluding the last 3 days, which will probably increase in views still) with 1.1M views, against the 2nd lowest which has 1.2M views, but it is a video about Mac gaming, and that isn't a particularly performing topic.

Yeah people get mad at click bait but it's called that for a reason, it works. Probably an unpopular opinion in this thread but I don't find LTT's too bad.

I love LTT. It's entertaining, and he shows cool stuff. And you can even learn a thing or two.

And I am gonna be even more unpopular than you.
I find Steve from GN to be boring as fuck to watch regularly (though I watch him when I want to see a specific review, like I do with other channels, his content is very good in terms of information), and he resorts to clickbait regularly, even if a different kind of clickbait (that waste of sand thumbnail, if it was LTT, would be criticized forever).

And more, even if you want to buy something instead of watching for entertainment, you shouldn't rely on 1 single review anyway, so pretending GN is the be-all-end-all for tech reviews is ridiculous.

I get that people can find him annoying, but that plonker's video on dashcams actually helped me make a properly informed choice that literally saved me hundreds of dollars AND ensured I got something that actually had higher fidelity recording than many devices multiple times its price.

I'm glad he saved you money. I just wish he'd learn the basic grammar of production.

He's not the only bad YouTuber. 99.9% of them are clueless. Take the ubiquitous jump cut edit. They are everywhere. This is fine if you're a nouvelle vague French film director in the 1950s and 60s but have no place in a YT vid. It's unprofessional. None of these people seem to be able to get through a paragraph of text without fluffing their lines and consequently having to jump cut over the mistake. Watch an Andy Edwards music analysis vid and you'll see he can get through 45 minutes without a single edit. He knows his subject well and therefore is less prone to errors. If he does screw up he's smart enough to explain it and just let things flow without interruption.

What's with editing every breath and pause between sentences? Anyone that tried to talk like than in real life would die of oxygen deprivation before the end of their vid. It's unnatural and destroys the flow.

Then there's the unnecessary use of effects. It reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing when everyone and his dog suddenly became typographers. The horror, the horror. Just because they have 49 installed typefaces doesn't mean they have to use all of them in their poxy one page newsletters but that didn't stop them.

The basic principles of film and TV production were established over a century ago. If some spotty oik with a computer and a cam in his bedroom at his parents' house thinks they can do better then bring it on. I have yet to see any evidence of this happening. Putting some Star Wars toys on a shelving unit in the background and draping some LEDS over it is not visual innovation.

Let me summarise: Know your subject. Write a decent script. Learn it. Rehearse until you are perfect. Don't use SUPERFLUOUS capitalisation in the TITLES of your latest MASTERPIECE.

I've been in the business too long and amateurs irritate the f**k out of me. There's a lot more I could mention but life's too short.

Ok. grumpy old man rant over :)

This isn't tv or a movie, you have a lot more competition on youtube. People will not leave a theatre, and tv is most of the time just background noise. But people will click out of a video fast. On youtube, everytimes you leave a two seconds blank, you loose a significant part of your audience. And with LTT posting 5 videos a day, of course they can't learn everything to make perfect shots when they can just cut it and appear more dynamic.

LTT is a company with more than 100 employees, they have professionnal who spend their life in analytics to make the best performing videos. That means epileptic editing with cut and effect every few seconds. And shitty thumbnail and title which I will gladly replace with this extension from now on.

@Spudger @foss I would even argue that you don’t even have to be good at reading your script. Just get rid of all the jump cuts and videos would become much more bearable

Yup. I used to enjoy Niccolove's work when he was a naive noob with no idea about production. Now he's just another unwatchable YouTuber drowning in effects and gimmicky editing. The first rule of communication is communicate first. Everything else is Garni du Jour (© Frank Zappa):

The way in which the material is presented is equally important as what's on the record. It's the GARNI DU JOUR way of life. You go buy a hamburger. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish, it means one thing. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish with a piece of green stuff and a wrinkled carrot and a radish – even though you don't eat that stuff – it's a Deluxe Hamburger. It's the same piece of dog meat on the inside, but one's got the GARNI DU JOUR. American have become accustomed to having a GARNI DU JOUR on everything

I really like this, and I will probably use it, but I hate clickbate thumbnails with a passion and avoid them as much as I can.

Just out of curiosity, how do you determine what is and isn't clickbait?

I'd like to know this as well. The extension looks super interesting, but how does it determine what to replace the thumbnail and title with?

It uses user submitted titles and thumbnails if they are available. If not, it uses a random frame from the video as a thumbnail and applies some rules to the title (like no caps etc.).

For example a LTT video from yesterday:

Original title: 'Only YOU can fix GPU pricing... Here's how!'

Replaced title: 'How to find a good deal on a used GPU'

And about the thumbnails, just take a look on YouTube. In general I mean 😄

Like the existing "Clickbait Remover" addon, I believe it just removes formatting (caps lock, exclamation marks, other symbols and emojis) of the video title and swaps the custom thumbnail with either a thumbnail of the beginning, middle or end of the video (youtube provides thumbnails for various points in videos).

You can see in the video linked in the extension's website. It relies on people proposing and voting for different titles and thumbnails.

I don't see where I can submit titles on a video page?

For SponsorBlock there's a button in the video player toolbar.

The demo video shows a button on the video description title. But I don't see one (on a video that has no DeArrow data yet).

Are submissions not open yet?

/edit: Since my comment I've seen it on video pages a while later. Dunno if it was a technical issue, delay, account moderation, or video / channel specific or what.

This is indeed just a display bug of the button not showing up> who

Hope Newpipe Sponsorblock adds this ❗

Oh nice, thank you for making this and Sponsorblock Ajay, what a great person.

@e8d79 cool. haha. but still. i wanna see click bait titles, because then i know who is most likely a scammer 😀

Just installed it and there is an option to have a "show original" button.

@crunchpaste cool. good to know

It would be awesome if there was a option to have original title in brackets under new title

I'm loving this and have contributed a bunch already, but one problem I'm noticing is people labeling things "reviews" on videos that are definitely not reviews, like impressions videos or unboxings.

Interesting problem. I wonder if people will re-learn the correct terms over time when seeing other labeled submissions. I feel the word "review" has destroyed by a lot of YouTube channels.