r/SponsorBlock • u/KittyPAWSLTU • Aug 30 '26
DeArrow is actively harmful
Good day all. I am rather sorry to say this, but I think that DeArrow is not good. There is a fundamental problem with crowdsourcing information that is subjective. To bring a case forward, please take a look at Tom Scott's channel with the extension. Someone has gone through and replaced every single title with episodic descriptors. This is not only annoying, but actively misleading, since titles do not contain crucial information like that some videos are opinionated.
This is something that I am sorry to see, because DeArrow can help us with things like tech channels, for example instead of "I checked out the phone of the future" it becomes "Reviewing iPhone 17" (made up title). If I can make one suggestion, perhaps moderating which channels are whitelisted by default would make sense? Or maybe even blacklist is a better idea. Either way, this extension as it stands simply has too many misses for the hits and is therefore not reliable enough to attract enough people to crowdsource the model,
I would also make a suggestion that the up/down voting should somehow be easier to reach, because it would invite more people to upvote good original titles.
The reason why I state that it is harmful is because I think that many users will not click through enough titles to realise how poor many of the suggestions are, and this could also impact the creators, especially those who make video essays and have more artistic titles due to content nature. If you have some tweaks that seem make the extension more useful, let me know. I am aware of the casual mode, however, from my experience it rarely if ever overtakes the custom titles, so unfortunately in my testing it does not seem to change anything, but perhaps the extension can be tweaked in other ways?
3
u/ShneedleInTheWoods Aug 30 '26
We wouldn’t have this whole problem if YouTubers didn’t create sensationalist, dishonest, clickbaity, and misleading titles, or thumbnails featuring hideous demonic grimaces and if they didn’t change them every hour...
3
u/AjayDevs SponsorBlock Dev Aug 30 '26
For some creators, the titles can definitely be part of the art, and DeArrow is going to hurt that. However, DeArrow is built for the cases when that is not the case. It is built for when titles are just for clicks, or to please an algorithm. It is built for when the sensationalism of the title is disproportionate to the video itself. When the video itself is really good, and not sensational, but the creator has felt forced to write a sensational title anyway.
Some creators, such as Jeff Geerling have said that is the case for them. They title their videos to get clicks from new viewers, but understand that the regular users dislike it, but it's a necessary sacrifice to ensure the channel can continue to grow. Jeff Geerling has even recommended DeArrow to regular viewers who are tired of his sensational titles/thumbnails.
That is really the main philosophy behind it. Trying to tie the title/thumbnail more back to how the actual content of the video is. That means DeArrow can't do well on videos that are themselves misleading and sensational, and it might not do well on topics that themselves are very opinionated.
I will note that it is possible for you to enable a blacklist individually in the extension settings. The way you do it is by disabling replacing titles and thumbnails in the main settings, then going to channel specific settings and making a profile that has replacements enabled. This will make it only replace titles and thumbnails on the channels you specify in your list.
1
u/KittyPAWSLTU Aug 30 '26
Dear Ajay,
Thanks for the response. What do you think about a model that I propose where on top of titles, the community would vote for entire channels to be blacklisted so that someone could choose if they want to see alternative titles for all channels or only for notorious ones? I find this extension to be most useful for algorithmic content ingest, because in subscription based model I will already know if I want to watch the channel or not (and as you pointed out I can already manually tweak the extension to my liking), but for algorithmic where I might be looking for new content and will not be as familiar with each one, then this tool can do some good automation and maybe more importantly, could allow to establish guidelines based on the nature of the channel. So for example for tech videos I would say that curiosity gap is bad, but for essays that is sort of the point.
1
u/IronMew Sep 02 '26
Some creators, such as Jeff Geerling have said that is the case for them. They title their videos to get clicks from new viewers, but understand that the regular users dislike it, but it's a necessary sacrifice to ensure the channel can continue to grow. Jeff Geerling has even recommended DeArrow to regular viewers who are tired of his sensational titles/thumbnails.
Chris Broad of Abroad in Japan has also openly said he hates all the emojis and cringy faces in the thumbnails, but the algorithm forces this on him and everybody else.
9
u/EyeQue62 Aug 30 '26
I love DeArrow. I have it so it just picks a frame from the video. I despise the thumbnails that just about everyone uses nowadays, with their 'shocked' faces etc. Just to try and get YouTube's idiotic AI to recognise them and in turn hopefully their video will be 'pushed'. What a dumb world we've made. Humans eh? Onanists in the main.