It's pretty telling a platform like YouTube really only gets fully enjoyable with an adblocker, sponsorblock and this. I wish PeerTube had a lot of good creators, but last time I checked (years ago, admittedly) it was mostly conspiracy theorists and cryptobros.
The problem with PeerTube is that there's no built-in way for creators to get paid. If there are no ads or sponsors, then the only alternative is some kind of value for value system like what Podcasting 2.0 has. Until some kind of well integrated funding system gets built for PeerTube, creators really are not going to be incentivized to publish stuff on the platform.
I'd even add Unhook (hide Trending, Shorts, Merch, replace "Home Feed" with subscriptions etc.) and Age Restriction Bypass (avoid the need to verify your account with a credit card). I also use Clickbait Remover. It essentially does the same as DeArrow without the crowdsourcing, which is already good enough for me.
Thanks, I didn't know revanced was a thing.
I only enjoyed old vanced for briefly in its last days. So good to hear theres still options like this around.
Really good extension, I've added it to my browser.
While some creators like Linus have said they dislike the clickbaity titles and thumbnails but they have to do it due to engagement that's simply because the younger generations are the ones engaging with that content. As an older person I'd rather just have a to the point description of what I'm going to get.
I'm going to set the fallback thumbnail to the original instead of a random thumbnail. The randomly generated thumbnails are too out of context to be useful.
Don't forget that creators will release a video that you might want to watch later and then change the information.
You'll see a video you want to check tomorrow but not enough to add it to the "watch later". But when you check your subscriptions the next day it's been 12+ hours and they've changed the title and thumbnail to further game the algorithm.
Love the idea, but just to be the devil's advocate, I think it will just mask garbage videos. Currently, the clickbait thumbnails and titles are an indicator to blacklist a channel, without having to waste time watching it.
If you look at the DeArrow website and browser extension pages, I made sure to only use high quality channels as examples (Tom Scott, CGP Grey) to demonstrate how far reaching the sensationalism problem is.
CGP Grey is personally painful to me. He used to be a no-nonsense education youtube legend, but in the last few years he's just maximised clickability - even going thorugh his whole back catalogue and changing titles and thumbnails.
For example, he made a great video about generative adversarial networks ~5 years ago but now its titled "How machines like ChatGPT learn" - despite coming out before GPT.
Creator of theq extension here, that is an optional permissions (may ask). It never asks to access to all sites, it only optionally let's you add support for additional sites such as different Invidious instances. These are arbitrary domains, so it needs permission to ask for any arbitrary website.
Support for invidious is not actually done yet, so right now, it never asks for permission for any new sites anyway
The client side data is used to store your submissions to always show your preferred title, even if there is another submission on the server. You can disable this option in the settings
Without having investigated the plug in itself, going by just what you posted: That's not likely to be a nefarious request, the plug-in needs to store data on your computer. Dealing with large number of titles it makes sense that it would cache things on your computer to minimise overtaxing their servers, to serve you more or less the same data over and over.
Google's algorithm has forced people into using click bait thumbnails and titles. If they don't attract more views and subscribers, then their channels are not pushed.
I think a bigger problem is they demonetize and depromote any video discussing a controversial or kid-unfriendly topic. This affects the actual content.
Also, don't forget to subscribe, hit that like button, smash that bell, and leave a comment letting me know what you think!
Are you implying that content creators don't themselves want more views and subscribers? Of course they do!
"They only use thumbnails and titles that get views and subscribers because if they don't... they won't get views and subscribers since Google isn't pushing their content."
The point is that channel growth, clicks and interactions as a metric is used more for suggesting videos than relevancy and the likelihood that someone will watch a video to the end.
This creates a click bait arms race between creators.
It's real easy to solve this problem by just not pushing videos with text, arrows, symbols or reaction soyfaces in thumbnails. The issue is that they push all of that to the top and push everything else to the bottom.
I kind of like seeing the clickbait, it lets me know which videos/channels arent worth my time. I know most use at least a little clickbait these days, but from the better channels its usually managable and still on topic (like the Real Engineering example shown here, whereas the others are complete clickbait that I would avoid).
I don't mind the clickbait as much because I've learned to filter the crap out to some degree (following F1 channels does that to a mf), but still, anything to keep the bullshit to a minimum.
The majority of videos I that pop up on my home feed don’t have clickbait thumbnails. A few admittedly do, but they are usually way toned down and when mixed among other videos in my feed not as vacuous when it’s just a few of them.
I think the issue can be largely self correcting on the user side if people just take a little bit of effort to curate good content for themselves.
Unfortunately, terrible thumbnails and titles are just a part of the culture in some circles, even if the channels themselves make good content. Look at this trash, and these are actually the better ones:
Tbf I can't think of any instance where Marques has click baited. At most they're just obnoxious. But it's been proven to work, as dumb as it is. Also Marques's thumbnails are nowhere near as cringe as other Youtubers.
While I wish the days of 2007-2013 YouTube returned to the non clickbait and non garbage thumbnails, those days are over. I'd rather have the obnoxious thumbnails so I know which creators are trash.
I don't know who this person is, but the example in the OP is definitely clickbait. "This phone is nearly perfect" but doesn't say what the phone is, baiting you to click for the answer instead of just mentioning what phone we're reviewing.
No judgement, it's his business and he's gotta make money, but saying he doesn't do this just seems demonstrably wrong.
Yeah exactly, these kinds of titles make me not wanna click at all because I got no idea what it's about (since it's almost certainly not gonna be the perfect phone), so usually I don't watch this kind of content at all. DeArrow really helped navigate around this crap and even LTT is kinda interesting to watch again because I finally know if a video is gonna be interesting to me BEFORE clicking it.
I installed this app and looked up some Mr. Beast vids as a test. If anything, it made more tempted to check out his vids just because I don't have to see his annoying giant soyface in every thumbnail now.
The sad thing is that even good channel are driven to do this bullshit because people do really watch those more often. How can we be such a brainless hive mind...
E.g. Marques Brownlee actually does do decent reviews.
Clickbait remover uses YouTube's auto generated ones, which while are seemingly random, are not. They use some algorithm to target faces in exaggerated expressions.
DeArrwow uses actually random ones (and then a user can submit specific timestamps if there is a better one). It's noticeable better on many channels imo
Yeah, especially for some creators like veritasium where they play "musical thumbnails" and change it every few days for about a week or so. It's so annoying because I keep thinking it's a different video.
I want to know when YT made it possible to have thumbnails be their own image and not taken from the video itself. I can scrub the video through every single frame and never actually find the thumbnails anymore.
Hell, sometimes the text in the thumbnail says something that isn't even discussed in the video at all. Those are the ones I hate the most. And I wouldn't necessarily want to remove the thumbnail, just because there are plenty of channels that make the thumbnail the actual title and the title is just... Bullshit, non-descriptive, a number, etc. Not all of them are bad. Civvie 11 and Internet Comment Etiquette do this. Erik probably does it on purpose both for the fact it works and also because he is a satire channel that regularly shits on these practices by showing how dumb they are. Civvie also satirizes YT's bullshit, but that's not really the prime focus of the channel.
For specific types of video where they are mostly similar looking (For example, online TCGs and such), it can be hard to get a thumbnail you want that looks different than other videos of the same type, so people were adding long segment with the static image of thumbnail they wanted at the end of the video for a workaround, until Google finally relented and just let people use the thumbnails they want.
I don't have a problem with this, I just try not to watch videos with clickbait thumbnails and/or titles, because if they think they "had" to do that, then their content usually isn't very good to begin with.
I think it's really telling when creators have different thumbnails on Nebula vs YouTube. It could even be interpreted as a scream for help "this is the thumbnail I wanted but this is the thumbnail that puts food on my table"
I suppose to drive engagement with fake thumbnails, the same thing they do when they put irrelevant things into your search results (thankfully that one is easily blocked by a uBlock filter).
True, but even if YouTube forced you take a screenshot from the video people would add the image in the last frame similar to what they sometimes do for YT shorts.
For people wondering, the extension is also capable of changing clickbait title into a more descriptive one. You could also have a button toggle on each video to see the original title and thumbnail vs the changed one
Great idea! You can't really get away from the clickbait thumbnails. As others said even good channels are heavily incentivised to do it.
It is already really difficult to find the stuff that is actually worth watching on YouTube. If you boycotted all clickbait thumbnails you would miss out on some otherwise great creators.
I'd much rather take clickbait thumbnails and baked in ads though as I can get around them with extensions and there is still a worthwhile video behind them.
When creators start doing low effort content like reaction videos, unboxings/product first impressions, or product "showcases" (ads) is when I usually know a channel has outlived its usefulness and stop watching altogether.
i would use this but some of the channels i watch the most number their thumbnails and dont do clickbait like this. if i could pick and choose per channel somehow it would be more helpful to me. i do agree with the sentiment though!
You can do different settings per channel. So, you can allowlist channels, or even do the reverse, and only change titles/thumbnails on channels you don't like.
Same. The channels I really enjoy create their own non-clickbait emails. They also tend to "standardize" their video titles so they all follow a similar format. I wish there was a way to whitelist certain channels.
Thank you for the link. It works great! Now I have the perfect YouTube with Ublock Origin + Sponsor Block + Dearrow + Return Youtube Dislike. It's crazy how many extensions you need to add to make YouTube bearable.... it's really time for a good competitor to take its place !
I have dearrow and I like it. I also installed Unhook, which "hides YouTube related videos, comments, shorts tab, suggestions wall, homepage recommendations, trending, and other distractions".
I don't really see how it's click baity. Click bait implies that it's lying or exaggerating something, and that thumbnail is basically spot on. You click that link and you get exactly what you expected.
Can vouch this extension is amazing. I started using it when it had 200 chrome downloads and it was already had many prominent creators in its database.
Title and thumbnail replacements are based on community votes, just like sponsorblock.
Wo a new extension worthy of installation, the last time that happened was a years ago, Channel Blocker. Feels like an ongoing battle with yt, to make it viewable to a human rather than it's own bots.
This sounds like a nice addon, sadly most of my YT consumption is done from my Nvidia Shield TV with STN, so I still get those annoying thumbnails I think (I have them in my home screen and that's where I watch them or add them to the list to watch later within the Shield menu).
I just thought about giving it a try then remembered that 99.9% of my time on YT is through the Android app (ReVanced to be precise) and TV (YT AdFree on LG TV)
By default, if there are no submissions, it will [...] set a screenshot from a random timestamp as the thumbnail.
Would it be possible to extract the most watched position from the watch graph in the seek bar or use positions that were already tagged as highlights in sponsorblock for better defaults?
Doesn’t it really matter if the title is click baity if the content is worth watching. It generates revenue for the content creator so I feel like I’d rather them have what works than a cleaner title.
Clickbait remover uses YouTube’s auto generated ones, which while are seemingly random, are not. They use some algorithm to target faces in exaggerated expressions.
DeArrow uses actually random ones (and then a user can submit specific timestamps if there is a better one). It’s noticeable better on many channels imo
Wait, the default thumbnails are no longer just chosen from three points in the video based on percentage? Now they use algorithms to generate a suitable thumbnail too?
On firefox youtube videos take a long time to load, they'll play for a bit and then buffer. Without this extension youtube works fine on chrome. I guess this extension is in beta stage, needs to be polished more.
Considering it's from the same person behind sponsorblock, I'm positive future updates will fix this issue..
Edit: Seems I was using old version, just updated the extension as developer said they'd fixed the above issue in new version. So far so good, now videos are playing fine on firefox..
Maybe a feature request, but is there an addon that just blocks videos with shitty thumbnails or all caps? Might make the front page almost presentable.
If this extension could just hide those videos as an option, or at least flag them it might make browsing better.
Yooo that's so cool!
I'm already using SponsorBlock for in-video stuff, uBlock Origin for the around the video stuff, and a Thumbnail remover (can't recall the name rn).
But I think this is even better, because just the first or middle frame of a video isn't exactly capturing the essence of that video.
Clickbait remover uses YouTube’s auto generated ones, which while are seemingly random, are not. They use some algorithm to target faces in exaggerated expressions.
DeArrwow uses actually random ones (and then a user can submit specific timestamps if there is a better one). It’s noticeable better on many channels imo. It also let's us do things like make sure the random thumbnail is not in a sponsor using SponsorBlock data
This feels like, IMHO, trying to put out a forest fire with a single bucket of water. Instead, we should have a platform that does not encourage making titles and thumbnails completely unrelated to the video's content.
This really feels like another one of those bandwagon pet peeves, like Comic Sans, pineapple on pizza, or toilet paper orientation. Like, if it pisses you off so much, then don't reward the creator by watching their video. In fact, the addon kind of defeats its own purpose by making you more likely to do just that.
YouTube creator guidelines encourage clickbaiting because engagement means more ads being served. They also encourage begging for "like, subscribe, ring the bell and comment" in every video for the same reason.
The algorithm burying other videos is just the side-effect. Non-clickbaity videos are still suggested if the engagement is high.
I hate that the YouTube scheme works, it's extremely unfriendly to both the consumers and the creators. But that's how the world turns nowadays. My YouTube bookmark links to my subscriptions tab, so I never have to go to the main site.
Sadly I don't think boycotting clickbait channels is a solution at this point. First, because almost every Youtuber does it. Second, even if you boycott it, it will remain a shockingly effective strategy.
Case in point, after installing this extension I was shocked as to how little I wanted to click on videos - clickbait works.
This really feels like another one of those bandwagon pet peeves
Open YouTube in a private tab, and if you aren't convinced click on the first MrBeast video you see, mute and let it play through then return to the homepage and see the results. Some creators are far worse than others, but the top .1% of channels are so insanely over the top with this
If you read the original Reddit post, or watch the MKBHD video specifically referencing it, you will see that Brownlee recreated an experiment demonstrating that the phone was inserting a pre-made image of the moon when and where it 'recognised' the moon in the scene. This is beyond what you could call 'post processing', it's in the realm of 'photoshopping'. No Brownlee was not especially outspoken but I don't think there was anything ambiguous or deceptive with his presentation.
I'm assuming the difference would be that most post processing doesn't add additional details to the photo but rather just edits or adjusts the already present details in the photo. Do you have any source confirming any other phone that adds extra details to the photo like the samsung s22?
I wonder what happens if you try to search off the changed titles? Obviously it won't work on other devices that don't have it, but on the same device, will "Zenfone 10 review" return that MKB video?
If people wanted what this extension did, YouTubers wouldn’t make thumbnails like this. Unfortunately, it’s what gets clicks, so they’re forced to do it to get engagement. Linus of LTT has lamented the fact that he has to make click bait titles, but it earns the big bucks so he has to do it. That’s how being a YouTuber works.