SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

The creator of this extension also makes DeArrow [1]. It replaces the clickbait thumbnails and titles with less annoying ones. I highly recommend it.

[1] https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Whoah, how does it do that? It looks like magic, so does it handle the clickbait use of "this" as well ("this game", "this recipe", "this film")?

I'm using one that just decapitalizes and uses a random frame thumbnail from the middle, which is okay.

According to the extension homepage:

"DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.

...

There are currently 64,634 users who have submitted 230,432 titles and 107,027 thumbnails."

Oh my god, what a difference it made. Thanks for sharing this. I do wish this could have just been a feature tacked on the Sponsor Block extension, especially considering it has features which rely on that data, but otherwise it's perfect.

For those that haven't watched the demo video: for videos that don't have community thumbnails or titles it has options allowing it to automatically pick a random (non-sponsor segment) screenshot and automatically clean up the title (remove emoji, fix capitalization).

I used to use it, unfortunately it doesn't work so well with titles. It lowercases unknown acronyms and initcaps all words even in languages which Do Not Use This Capitalization For Titles.

Yeah, Clickbait Remover extension is similar. It's available for all main browsers and replaces the egregious thumbnails with a frame from either the first, middle, or last part of the video. I like it!

I stopped using this because I found out that I want that custom thumbnails and tittles as a signal of quality. Many thumbnails will signal which creator made the vid at first glance, where before I sometimes missed video from channel I have involuntary vocal reaction whenever they release a new vid (exurb1a).

Its also very helpfull for determining the quality of the video itself. Usually from that one picture I can tell that even if the video is about a topic I'd like to know more about, I definetly dont want to learn in that specific video. Removing this signal made me waste way more time in videos that seemed good from the tittle alone.

I found this extension significantly less useful than SponsorBlock. The "less clickbait" titles are all invariably written in a worse fashion and are overtly wordy and annoying. The non-clickbait thumbnails looked worse and were mostly random screencaps of unrelated portions of the video because most people didn't bother picking a proper screenshot. My barometer for this was Tom Scott's channel which generally has titles that are mostly all fine yet a lot of them were "rewritten" for no reason that I could discern

SponsorBlock is significantly more useful but you still see the same kind of annoying people there too. There's a channel called "11foot8" that puts out videos of the local 11'8" (+ 8" after they raised it semi-recently) where trucks disobey the height warning and get destroyed. Most of the videos are around 1 minute long yet there are people picking "highlight" moments in SponsorBlock to skip to the relevant portion. These are mostly videos about a minute long so it baffles me the kind of people whose attention span is that short to want to skip 10 whole seconds to get to the "action". These are the kind of annoying people that rule DeArrow. I didn't want to deal with that anymore

You can change that in the settings.