My own feelings about the lead dev aside (I dislike him for personal reasons), this addon isn't very good, a lot of the rules and guidelines as well as the nature of the extension lead to titles and thumbnails that are subjectively clickbait and/or bad being treated as objectively clickbait and/or bad and being replaced with titles and thumbnails not suited to the content of the video with an overly complex whitelisting system not helping matters in the slightest.

It also asks for payment up front to use it right away, which is very shady for an extension. Though if asked, the lead dev will give you a code if you ask for one in a review, though not in exchange for a review, or ask on his discord server.

EDIT: Since the dev took time out of his busy day and replied to this review I will provide further context and say that these reasons were not communicated to me at all until after he'd removed my moderator status and blocked me and that I had to complain on his public discord server in order to get a response from him, which boiled down to "People were complaining about your attitude" which I was entirely unaware of and thus I was not given a chance to fix this problem until it was too late

If there were any other reasons besides that, then those were never communicated to me either
Also clarified some language about keys and reviews

Works like a charm. I have the free 'version' bc I don't have a credit card (no need) and no paypal (don't trust pp), but when I find a suitable way to donate, I will. Anyways, I'd like an option to personally whitelist channels for showing original thumbnails - eg music channels that continuously show babes as thumbnails, I don't mind those polluting my view :-P

what the addon description purposefully omits, is the crucial fact that you cannot in fact use the addon at all, even if you cannot pay. i clicked that option and its still asking me to pay, or wait for a multitude of hours. What is the reason for this other than to annoy and coerce the user? absolute garbage and greed.

It's a fine extension, it does what it is supposed to do however the concept gets ruined by moronic title edits made by idiots. So often I see fine, non-problematic titles being replaced with a non-descriptive mess. Important/valuable information gets removed for the sake of being changed, and I end up thinking "who thought this edit would be a good idea?" so often.

For example, this video:
"BETA SQUAD MAFIA GAME FT DEJI (CHILLI FORFEIT)"
gets changed to:
"Mafia E11"
whereas a better title would be:
"Beta Squad: Mafia E11 ft. Deji"

Here's another stupid change on a video from Techquickie:
Original: "Why do speakers hiss?"
Replaced: "speaker Noise: Hiss and Hum"

I try using the voting feature to downvote the awful new titles / I try to submit my own but I have no idea if it does anything as I never see anything change. The thumbs up/down emoji does a twirl and there's no indication if it did anything or what it does. This panel really needs some improvement.

KNOW BEFORE BUYING:

Don't expect a name to change. In practice, there was a 1% or less change in the names of videos I watched. Enabling DeArrow mostly changed capitalization.

Re-titles are user-submitted only. There will be NO title change unless a user has submitted one.

This makes YouTube an infinitely better user experience! I really appreciate the lack of visual clutter all the loud thumbnails cause especially. It does make my subscriptions & home page load a little more slowly, but that's well worth it in my opinion.

For some channels I'm subscribed to (like crochet/craft channels), I found I missed the thumbnails because those show the finished craft product, thankfully it was easy to whitelist those.

I did also change the default thumbnail replacement from "random" to "auto-generated by YouTube", which led to less awkward half-blink faces in my feed.

Once activated, the extension immediately worked on all my devices where I'm logged in to Firefox, and I was able to re-use the activation code on a shared family device where I am not logged in on my Firefox account. Overall, a great experience and well worth the 1 euro.

One minor negative is that in some interfaces (like browsing a channel's videos) the blue logo button doesn't work to view the original title/thumbnail, because it will open the video link instead.

Best extension and dollar spent, truly amazing

doesn't work, random thumbnails are showing up completely unchanged. shame that this extension used to work and is now utterly broken

Nice extension. Docked a couple stars because the guideline to capitalize replacement titles like "a sentence" is ridiculous and looks horrible.

Please add an option to convert _only_ the replacement titles into "Title Case." Otherwise, normal titles containing phrases like "ABC" or "NASA" become "Abc" and "Nasa."

On the other hand, an option to make Title Case only affect lowercase words would be great.

Happy to send in a PR. Just let me know.

Loved this one. I recommend to everyone to use this extension to save yourself from clickbats thumbnail

omg all the video thumbnails just flicker non stop and slows/freezes the whole browser

Paid extension? I am not buying anything!

EDIT: Is it donationware? I will test it, maybe I can make a contribution.

I like it in theory, but I am really, really, really not a huge fan of American English title case being enforced across all titles, even non-English ones (despite the setting that claims to not do this). I strongly believe the default setting should a conversion to sentence case.

Incredible work by the same creator as SponsorBlock. I feel such a hatred towards clickbait because I know what I'm interested in, and I will click on those videos but I hate it when I feel the rug has been pulled from me (even though my investment may only be a minute). Also, it's difficult to re-find a video when the video isn't just titled what it's about.

Ajay is the person to do this correct. Ignore the 1 star reviews they're by people who don't want to pay $1 (single time donation) even though you can just not pay, but do pay and let this important service have a chance of surviving.

Ajay, you should set up a Patreon or something tho, SponsorBlock has a huge number of users and I really want to see this and that be around long term.