this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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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 respectfully disagree. Any high quality creator is tangibly penalized by YouTube's recommendation algorithm for not optimizing their titles and thumbnails. A rare few choose to take this penalty but I don't blame the many quality creators who choose to take part in the game that YouTube has made for everyone.
Yes, the alternate titles may not be perfect, but I'd take any random person's attempt at a title over the hyper optimized ones any day because I'd rather make an informed decision to watch something even if there is some degree of inaccuracy than to make a completely uninformed decision based on what an algorithm predicted would most likely get me to click and get hooked on a video irregardless of my own will and whether I am satisfied at the end of watching it.
There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can't be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they're probably not people I want to engage with.
And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that's because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren't going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.
Fair. I guess in my case I'm actually looking for boring titles because I see reducing my engagement as a whole to the platform a good thing even if it means I don't watch some genuinely interesting / informative content. Basically I am less likely to fall into a rabbit hole of watching "just one more video" by some creator I enjoy when I should be doing something else.