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a browser extension
Take YouTube at
face value.
Every thumbnail on YouTube is a bid for your attention, and the bids keep escalating. Face Value rewrites clickbait titles from the video’s actual transcript, swaps shock thumbnails for a real frame, and removes Shorts if you want it to. You decide what deserves your time, based on what things actually are.
what they publish
what you see
How lithium batteries age and which habits slow it
TechDaily · 2.1M views
What Antarctic ice cores reveal about past climate
Horizon Lab · 840K views
Three common bench press form errors and fixes
Lift Theory · 1.3M views
Comparing street food and fine dining in Bangkok
Fork First · 3.6M views
The decline of the mid size sedan, explained
Torque Report · 990K views
What an hour in an anechoic chamber does to hearing
Field Notes · 5.2M views
drag the line
This is about your attention, not just bad titles.
The shouting isn’t a fringe problem anymore. Shocked faces, red arrows, capital letters, promises the video never keeps. Even honest creators making genuinely good work package it this way, because the algorithm rewards whoever grabs hardest. It stopped being a signal of anything.
Face Value takes that lever away. When every title says plainly what a video is, and every thumbnail is just a frame from the video, grabbing stops working. What’s left is a feed you can read like a library instead of a slot machine, and an attention span that belongs to you rather than to whoever reacted loudest.
Clean titles
Rewritten from the video’s transcript to say what it actually delivers. No caps lock, no curiosity gaps, no promises the content doesn’t keep.
Clean thumbnails
A real frame from the video instead of the engineered reaction shot.
Hide Shorts
One toggle removes Shorts shelves and reels everywhere. The part of the site built purely to keep you scrolling, gone.
Channel exceptions
Trust a creator? Pause Face Value on their channel and see them exactly as they publish.
How it works
We read the transcript
When a video first appears in anyone’s feed, our server fetches its public transcript. The actual content, not the packaging.
The title is rewritten
A language model rewrites the title to state plainly what the video is about, based on what is actually said in it.
A real frame replaces the thumbnail
We pull a sharp, representative frame from the video stream itself and show that instead of the thumbnail.
Results are cached and shared. The first person to see a video pays a few seconds of processing, everyone after gets it instantly. The extension never blocks your browsing; cards fill in as answers arrive.
Face Value runs without an account. Requests carry the video ids and titles on pages you view and nothing that identifies you. There is no analytics or tracking code in the extension or on this site. Full privacy policy
Free, and it costs us money.
Every title is a language model call and every thumbnail is real video processing. There are no ads and nothing is sold, so the servers get paid the old fashioned way.
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