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YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels (support.google.com)
355 points by zhamisen on July 31, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 210 comments



community-contributed subtitles are an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me, particularly with non-English videos from small operations who may not have the resources to provide quality transcriptions/translations. I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether.


> I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents.

I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it.

That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand what's important.

Because the most important part for getting good subtitles is to get the timing right, to make sure every subtitle is displayed for the minimum time needed, and to make sure you split the dialogue in the right places, so that reading them "flows", so that they match what's being said. And you want to tie them to scene changes, to keyframes, so you don't get weird blinking, and for that you need the ability to step through the video frame by frame and adjust the subtitles.

But the YT subtitling tools emphasized the text, and translations of the text. It was easy to suggest changes to a piece of text and get that through the "community" process, but changes to the timing was super-hard to do in their tools, and really hard to get through. You can upload a .srt that you've created in a real subtitling program, but that completely overwrites the existing subtitles, and was impossible to "diff" with what was already there, so that shit gets rejected as a rule, because reviewers don't understand the changes.

So the result is that whoever manages to make the first community translation that is accepted, that person's timing is then taken as canon by everyone else, and all other translations are based on those exact timing, never mind if they're good, never mind if they're a good fit for every language, never mind if someone else can do better timings.

And that completely sucks the joy out of the process, because you can't really improve existing subtitles, you can only try to change a word here and there.


Sounds like they took the wrong message from seeing that it wasn't being used as much as they were hoping. Are there any other video hosting sites with a better subtitling experience? This might be an opportunity for them.


The took the right message... for Google. Underinvest in tools, set up metrics that show that users don't use them, present those metrics as proof that "users don't need these features", remove features.


Could you recommend a tool that does subtitles and generates a .srt afterwards, from your experience?

I have a friend that translates everything from English for his grandmother, so she can watch movies that she does not understand, but he does it by hand in a video editing program. Would love to help him out.


I've tested a couple of the popular free ones, and settled on Aegisub. The default keybindings drove me nuts, they're not very ergonomic, but at least you can fix that easily.

.srt is the lowest common denominator for subtitle files, every subtitling program can import and export those. It's a pretty dumb format though, my biggest issue with it is that it doesn't have support for fixed-position left-aligned subtitles, and it doesn't have support for specifying the font. I understand why, it's to make playback much simpler and resolution-independent, which is why every single video player program or hardware device in existence has support for it.

But if you left-align it with a fixed margin, choose a good font, and use white text on black background, your subtitles are going to be so much easier to read.

(Here's a sample of what I prefer: https://skamenglishsubs.tumblr.com/post/188037245260/subtext...)


Isn't that left aligned? Am I missing something?


Crap, I meant left-aligned.

(I belong to the tiny minority of people who often mix up the words for left and right, it's both annoying and hilarious.)


Personally, I find the default keybinding for subtitle timing to be the best keybinding. But it's kinda not newcomer friendly.



Anecdote: I had a terrible time trying to use AegosSub, but Subtitle Edit is a total breeze: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/


Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale?

I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs context to select but randomly thrown around, probably as a best effort from translators.

e.g. [“X had occurred”, “Please do X now”, “Use this to do X”, “Choose which you want for X”, “Do X for this event”]

Microsoft used to be great in this regard in 2000s but now feel like I’m back at when gcc was telling me “$DIRNAME am directory entering”


I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation.

There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the autotranslation feature or people have naturally migrated away from it...

in general, I feel that tech, maybe due to being so overwhelmingly from the US, has very poor support for things like multilingualism, which is in fact more common than not across the world (the US being an outlier traditionally - and even there, I think the influence of Spanish is growing).

For example:

- On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one

- It's impossible on Android to have different apps use different languages (unless the app itself allows for it), which would not only fix the issue mentioned above with the badly translated apps, but also be really helpful e.g. for language learners

- It took Google Maps years to add a feature where, if you start typing a street name and it suggests a street, it gives you the option of directly filling in the street number too (e.g., I'm typing "Foob" and it suggests "Foobarstraße, 11111 Berlin", but giving me the option to directly type the street number before the comma). My hypothesis for why this took so long to add is that people from the US were totally oblivious to the need for this feature, since in the US, the street number comes before the street name and people could just type "123 Foob" and get the suggestion for the full address

- There is simply no way in the Play Store (and I believe in the App Store it's similar?) to see reviews in another language than the one from your store. This makes no sense for me, for many apps there are very few if any German reviews, but I'd still like to see English ones. I think it's even worse for app developers, although maybe they have some separate way of seeing that? Amazon doesn't have that problem btw.

- Also, a pet peeve of mine: using country flags for languages. Yeah, nope.

and so on ...


> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation.

Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having different plural forms (so you might need to translate "users" differently depending on if you're talking about 2 users or 3 users).

This is not rocket science. We know how to do it. It's just that most businesses don't give a shit. English gets you far enough in terms of adoption in most markets that you don't really have to care about l10n unless you have to fulfil legal requirements. (Also, some markets have bad rates of English literacy, e.g. China, but those are usually served by local app providers.)

> On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one

Where I live (Germany), this has gotten way better over the years. Around ten years ago, cinema chains started offering screenings in original language (i.e. English) for the more popular movies. And cable TV started showing shows undubbed as well. The first thing I can remember there was Game of Thrones airing undubbed on the same day as the US release. I think the major reason was that piracy sites allowed users to access undubbed content easily. If you have the choice of watching the new GoT episode right now or waiting a year for the dub, most people are going to go with piracy. TV/cinema execs saw this and realized that there was a market to tap into.

Having access to undubbed content was actually quite eye-opening to me. Having only had contact with dubs up until that point, I only then realized how eye-wateringly shitty German dubs are. It appears to me like German dubbers don't really consider themselves voice actors (emphasis on the "actor" part). Sometimes it's like they think they're reading a newscast when it's actually an action scene.


You're not contradicting me It's not that we don't have the technology to do proper localisation, it's that the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users. There is this assumption that 1 person = 1 language which is just wrong in many parts of the world.


My disagreement is that, in the phrase

> tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation

you're using "understood" when it should actually be "cared about" which is substantially different. Also,

> the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users

I'm part of the tech industry and at the same time a non-English speaker and multilingual users, and I'm not oblivious to my own needs. The problem is not that tech people don't understand, it's that business decisions don't take multilingual users into account.

This differentiation is important. Rephrased like this, it becomes apparent that this is a matter of policy, not literacy. It becomes possible to imagine (though I'm not arguing this) a scenario in which apps with a sufficient number of users could be required by law to accommodate multilingual users.


> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation.

Yes and no. The majority of my experience with localization is via WordPress. Frankly, it's a PITA. Another thing to know, and so on. It's not an extension so to speak, it's another mountain to climb, another silo to wrestle with.

Furthermore, and yes this is unique to WP, it make no effort to leverage it's scale. Certainly, once (e.g.) 'Add to Cart' has been translated and vetted, it doesn't need to be done again. You should be able to submit your language file, have it parsed and spit back fleshed out as much as possible. Then you need only to focus on the bits that didn't find a match.

Yes. Some increase in understanding is in order. But an updating and upgrading of the tool(s) is over due as well.


Even trying to use popular software in a relatively big language like Spanish still inevitably ends up producing lots of untranslated strings (or worse, semi-translated nonsense).

I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.


I've seen that too and I simply don't understand that. Why do some people half-translate an app? Did they just hardcode some of the copy by accident?


They translated it once years ago, likely using external resources. My team has had this issue; we made internationalized versions of our website once, years ago, and it was quite expensive and used external language contractors. Then the i18n versions gradually fell out of date as we continually updated the English version (because that's what we full-time devs speak). Eventually, years later, the i18n versions were hopelessly out of date and turned down, because it wasn't worth paying for another round of internationalization on them given how little it turns out they were used.


But if you had put yourselves in a position to accept community contributed translations, this would not have happened, right?


How is a random static marketing website for a corporation supposed to put itself into a position where it accepts community translations? How would you vet said translations before going live with them (which would be mandatory) given that you don't speak the language?

And who in the world would volunteer their labor for free to do said translations?


It was intended to be a strange mixture of snark, cynicism and sarcasm connecting your described situation with what Google is doing, with the hope of illuminating the different ways people might think about their own work.

In your case, describing it as "a random static marketing website for a corporation" more or less shuts down the discussion.

In Google's case, while they probably don't see YT in those same terms, the convergence of the approach towards i18n suggests that maybe they're a little closer to it than they were.


The context of this particular thread, though, is about why the user interface in an app might not be translated well. I responded by way of example explaining how translations can fall behind in a very similar situation, that of a website.

Neither of these are the same as the YouTube situation, because in the YouTube situation you're dealing with user-contributed content being translated, which is a crucial difference. Community contributions were never about translating the YouTube UI (or god forbid privacy policy, ToS, etc.); they were only ever about users submitting translations of other users' content.


Maybe they fully translated an earlier version of the app but more strings were added in subsequent versions and not translated. When there's no translation available for a string, it falls back to English.


Because either you have to pay some native a decent money to make a translation or because some strings are embedded in code?


Google Translate used to have instant translation from a photo for more languages and then they turned them off, no reason why.

Also you get tremendously worse translations when you translate a document (pdf, doc) vs the "scan/import" an image of text function.

It's a real bummer because hypertext and mobile UI should be excellent mediums for presenting multiple candidate translations and letting the reader indicate the best translation.


Auto translation is probably a big deal for yt/google long-term. If they maintain/achieve dominance in this field they're practically the only one to have detailed insight and anlysis about video content. Fostering an alternative market would be negative and cause more uproar as soon they expand their auto translation services.


I don't see auto translation being anything else but terrible, for many many years still. Possibly forever. I just don't see a machine being able to handle the culture, tradition or customs that are so ingrained in language.

English to danish translations are universally awful. Barely comprehensible gibberish(¤). So I use English operating systems with locale set to en_DK, so dates display as D-M-Y like God intended, but a surprisingly large amount of software somehow thinks it knows better, and displays its UI in danish anyway, so I get to have a brain aneurysm while trying to parse their danish translation for "anisotropic filtering".

(¤) Pre-emptive snarky comment: "Exactly like spoken danish, LOL".


I don't feel this way at all. Videos have automatic subtitles which you can automatically translate into the language of your choice, speech recognition is so good that the right tool will let you program with it, text to speech is a button-click away for basically any Web page (all I need is an extension). Post-processing for color blindness is amazing, left-to-right languages render readably on a consistent basis. OCR is progressing dramatically and we're starting to see projects focused at individual users, and automatic image tagging gives textual descriptions of a huge amount of picture content.

We're at a point where a lot of these tools haven't matured in their consumer implementations, but that's coming. It's just a matter of time.

That's all ignoring the soft accessibility of things like iPads that have made computing accessible to Grandma.


Automatic subtitles for videos in a different language are basically a joke currently.

I agree that we're progressing fast, but fully automated machine translation is IMHO still lightyears away (if at all feasible). And to automate subtitle generation in a foreign language, you first need to have speech to text, which is also still error-prone, so now you have two sources of errors.

We're seeing the uncanny valley problem: By now, things like machine translation are so good for simple use cases, that they're being aggressively pushed, and at first it may even appear correct / as if it was done by a human, but then suddenly the translation becomes nonsensical and weird. Even for the well-received deepl, it's still surprisingly easy to give it some text that it really struggles with.

Incidentally, I remember attending a lecture about 12 years ago by the then new professor of NLP who was talking about his success with using machine aided human translation of subtitles from Swedish into Norwegian. Granted, a lot may have improved in 12 years, but it still struck me as impressive that even in languages that closely related, the best they could hope for in a research project was machine aided translation.


Machine translation can never replace real translators, unless we develop an AI with actual understanding.

Even with human-translated texts it's usually noticeable when the translator didn't understand the subject. To make sense of the translated text you then have to try to reverse-engineer the translator's mapping to figure out what the text would have said in the original.

Much like how you can't properly parse HTML using only regular expressions and string substitution, you can't truly translate human languages without understanding. You have to parse the input language, process the meaning of what was said and finally serialize to the target language.


Subtitling adds even more issues that machine translation simply can't handle, because like a good book translation, it's an artform.

Making good subtitles means you prioritize readability over accuracy. You have a limited amount of space for your text, and you want to keep a low characters per second, so you cut words, ruthlessly. But you have to choose which words to cut so that it still makes sense, which means that you have to identify filler words so you can cut them, or figure out ways to re-phrase something into a shorter sentence.

You probably also want to preserve the tone and style of the dialogue, which means you have to choose the right synonyms, not just the most common ones.

And if you're creating hearing-impaired subtitles, it becomes even more necessary to understand what's going on in the video. If someone slams a door center-screen, you can cut that from the subtitles if you have more important things to display, but if someone slams a door off-screen, you absolutely have to include it in the subtitles, because that's the kind of information a hearing-impaired person needs.

Good luck training your little machine-learning network how to identify which sound effects originate from objects on-screen and which originate off-screen...


I agree in the general sense. The problem is that good human translation works as follows: The translator reads the text, decodes this into some mental representation, and then encodes that representation in the target language. Both decoding and encoding are also highly subjective (which is why works of literature can be translated in many different ways, see e.g. all the translations of works like the Bible, the Odyssey, etc.).

Machine translation still works by a straightforward source-to-target mapping. This assumes that there is somehow a 1:1 correspondence between concepts in one language and concepts in the other one.

There are some cases where this can yield OK results: when the languages are very closely related and/or if the material is very technical (e.g. instruction manuals), because in such cases, the concepts do tend to align a bit better.

But in general, I think the problem is intractable without solving general AI.


> left-to-right languages render readably on a consistent basis

‫os epoh dluohs I.


> I don’t think this functionality was as little used

Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

> Clearly more options exist for managing spam

Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just ...” without realising that the approach would have poor precision/recall at scale. Any hard coded rule would probably rot. Building a classifier to detect this abuse would be tricky considering it’s low prevalence and that ML was doing a poor job of captioning in the first place (nothing to compare it to).

Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?


> We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views.

I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.


Clearly they need some method of prioritizing their work. HN would have you believe that every product and every feature should be supported till the end of time, regardless of whether it's used or not. In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

> I'm subscribed to about 100 channels

How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles? Note that even if you used subtitles, those could have been auto-generated.


> How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles?

Almost never, since all the content I consume is in English. But several channels made posts about that upcoming change and there was quite some feedback by people depending on this (as far as I could tell, especially the Spanish speaking community).

> In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too, since the number of viewers actually relying on them is a minority, and maintaining it probably takes some effort too.

I think community generated subtitles, just like regular subtitles on TV, enable people to access information (or entertainment) they otherwise couldn't. There should be a better measure for its value than just how much effort it takes to maintain that functionality vs the number of users, otherwise there would be little reason for any kind of barrier-free technology or efforts really.


So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

> By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too,

You made an implicit assumptions that TV subtitles and Youtube community contributed subtitles are used by the same proportion of people. That's almost certainly wrong. And remember, Youtube auto generated subtitles still exist for all videos.

Look I don't work for Google, but it pains me when I see a thread full of people shitting on them without any basis in fact.

Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.


> So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto-generated subtitles like this is something trivial that just works. Compared to everything else that is required to run a platform like YouTube, community generated subtitles pale in comparison.

> Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.

Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind? Never did the quality of a product suffer because corners were cut in order to save a few cents during production. Trusting a company like Google. A radical idea indeed.


> You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage

Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who. Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.

I'd ask you to reconsider this approach but tbh, this is the easiest way to farm upvotes on HN. So you do you.

> Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind

I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little.


> Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who.

As someone working in the field it's at least possible to make an educated guess about such things.

> Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.

No. You are primarily coming up with phrases like this, like "typical for HN" above to make it sound like everyone complaining is a pleb with no clue and you are far superior. You then go on to claim the reason people do this is to "farm upvotes" as a blanket invalidation, instead of contributing anything of substance.

> I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little

I initially criticized that you suggested going by share of users when judging the usefulness of this feature, by comparing it to CC on TV and similar technologies. I tried reasoning why I believe this is an important and valuable feature that should not be removed. Only in my third comment did I mention that I can't imagine that it takes too much work to maintain this feature. But you immediately jumped at it, screaming THIS!! and continued your arrogant ramble about stupid HNers. The only one in this whole comment thread coming across as authoritative is you.

> I'd ask you to reconsider this approach [...] So you do you.

Sometimes it's best to follow your own advice.

Over and out.


> How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles?

I suspect the answer to this question is entirely dependent on whether you speak English. If you don't speak English (and the person you're responding to obviously does), then you're reliant on subtitles regardless of source, unless you only stick to videos in your native language.


> Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?

Apart from the last statement "Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether." the person you replied you was obviously stating their opinions, and not claiming them to be facts.

> "an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me"

> I don't think this functionality was as little-used

Emphasis mine, in both cases.

As for the final statement, which is presented as fact, I think it probably is factually accurate that there are more possible options for YouTube than shutting the feature down.


"little used" is a stupid argument from YT. It may be little used on a global scale but vital to some specific groups.

By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.


Every feature is useful for some specific group out there. Doesn't mean it needs to remain supported. Here's an example - Youtube used to allow clickable links inside the video. Now it doesn't. That affected many channels, especially those that implemented their own "more like this" feature manually.

You have to make hard choices sometimes. If this is a feature that only a tiny minority cares about, then the team has to pull the plug on it.


With subtitles, the obvious solution is to not show them by default, even if the user has the corresponding language selected by default for subtitles in general. The net result would be the same as with this change, except that those of us who rely on community-submitted subtitles would still be able to use them (at the risk of seeing spam occasionally - but it's better than no risk and no feature).


I think the point is that google wants to save resources aka. put employees to work on something else.


Amen. How can you make claims like that so confidently? How can you think you know better about something than the team that built it and/or works on it for a living? Imagine someone making these claims about a product you work on. "You should add feature X. Everyone will use it." No, we've tried that beforę and only a tiny subset of users actually used it and it's a massive bitch to maintain.


yep, I see this feature being actively used on many of the channels i follow and I see it being appreciated frequently (and asked for when not enabled). This is a good example of inclusiveness in action; many people are able to appreciate content that otherwise may not be compelling to them due to language and ability differences. really sad to see it scrapped


I think it'd be helpful with community captions were more discoverable. I have no where of checking if the captions on a video are machine translated or human translated without going into sub menus. If the product of the community members' work was more apparent, the contributors would obviously feel like their labour had a bigger impact and want to create more captions.


The problem is if >50% of your videos are content less garbage and another quarter is from large networks and a large portion of the rest is in English it's easy to see how such an misconception can come into existence.

(Note: Ratios are poorly guessed based in my experience).


There was no option to disable them, and if you are multilingual it's a PITA. Sometimes I became so annoyed that I closed YT.

It's not the same effort for my brain to keep up listening to spanish, english, french or portuguese. And I WANT TO KNOW what I'm getting into. If I want subtitles or translations I'll activate it myself, thanks.

Sometimes I browse for a topic and I need a native POV out of it, but it became so difficult because YT just treats you like if you were stupid so yo loose time going back and forth.

IDK, maybe there was some option to manage it, but it was very well hidden in menus that I couldn't find it.


Toolbar in the bottom right, subtitle icon, disable.


That's only for subtitles, and somehow if you go into another video, you have to do it again.


Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare


My wife is a native Thai speaker, fluent in English, but if the speaker is speaking quickly and not clearly, it's very frustrating for her to follow along (especially if the speakers themselves are non-native speakers, or speaking with an Australian accent). Most of the automated subtitles on Youtube seem heavily biased toward high-school level vocabulary, so if the speaker is using more rare words, making literary references, or using some of the more common Latin / Greek / French phrases imported into English (medical/technical terminology, etc.), the subtitles can be very misleading. The automated subtitles are also generally garbage at catching proper nouns, often replacing them with rhyming phrases of common words.

At least the garbage is pretty consistent, so I can pause the videa and tell my wife that the phrase X Y Z in the subtitles is actually A B. (The number of syllables is almost always correct, but often the number of words is not.)

On a side note, it's not YouTube, and it's translation instead of strait subtitling, but I've seen some pretty bad English subtitles for Netflix's La Casa de Papel (Money Heist). I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I do remember a few times the translations were very odd and I realized the translator was translating a person's surname from Spanish into its English meaning, and not capitalizing it. It would have been just fine leaving the name untranslated, as my wife and I could both clearly make out the names of the characters. I presume a human translator would know not to translate names. I hope the subtitles I saw were third-party subtitles where someone ran Spanish subtitles through Google Translate.


Why do you think it's rare to want to watch something in a foreign language?

For the vast majority of people on this planet, English is not their first language (if they speak it al all), and their command of English may often not be good enough to comfortably understand all of the content they might want to enjoy. And it's still the case that most content on such platforms, and certainly often the most viral one, is in English.

And even beyond that, people sometimes learn other languages, in which case watching something in the target language with subtitles can be a very helpful step.


If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless.

Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.


If you speak multiple languages (which isn't uncommon out of the anglosphere) it becomes very annoying to have YT putting subtitles and translating stuff for you.

If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.


The automated video title translation "feature" is really fast turning me off YouTube. It's just confusing as hell to see a German title and then realise the video is actually in English.


English is my first language and I don't want automatic subtitles or translation for stuff in other languages.


To be honest, YouTube’s captioning struggles with even British accents.


Another use case is when you want to watch a video without the audio to avoid bothering the people around.

Auto closed captions quality depend on the language and the locutor. It works well for "presentation" content like vlogs and news, it fails for casual discussion or songs.


What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels.

If you go to Francais avec Pierres youtube channel for example, where they post videos covering various things about the French language, you can find translations in a number of langs, it’s a worthwhile exercise to compare community translations with automated translations— there is just no comparison. Why why why must you do this google


Their wholesale removal of features and entire damned products would not leave such a bad taste in my mouth if they didn’t build their entire business on the back of pushing you to live your digital life in their playground. I’ve done my best to divert myself of having anything in any vertical that Google is in being mainlined in my online activities. I’m sick of being the product, I’m sick of making their business billions of dollars only for them to once again pull the rug out from under us.


My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned.

There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile and hop from one project to the next, and so the knowledge and desire to maintain something goes away with it.


I hear this explanation a lot. What I don't get is how Google, a company known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers, hasn't realized that their organizational structure causes this sort of build-and-abandon pattern. In any case, the rest of us at large shouldn't have to suffer just because Google can't figure out how to build meaningfully long-lasting services.


Build and abandon makes total sense for Google. They are participating in an IP land rush. Expect this to accelerate.

The engineers that Google hires to keep them from working for competitors are used to build as many new products and features as possible. Abandoned products are assets in Google's IP portfolio and continue to protect them against competing products and features long after Google has closed the door.


Are they though? ("Known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers?") I've actually never heard something in that direction, in many signs it is not the case (starting with broken recruiting).

It is however I believe good at keeping engineers happy, and good and good at managing their engineer infrastructure (though it is very Google-specific, and not necessarily a good fit for the rest of the world). But that doesn't say that engineers are being managed cleverly or efficiently.


I'm sure they are aware (or at least some people there are aware), especially since it is repeatedly pointed out on the internet. They just might not care.


I can't imagine they care.

Yeah, people are justifiably upset that they dropped this feature. But they are also, to my knowledge, the online video source that ever offered a feature like this in the first place. So nobody's upset is realistically going to translate into an exodus to a competitor, and the effect on their bottom line is negligible, and they have zero reason to care.

You know how the last 3 hours of any game of Monopoly is just this long, shitty, inhuman slog that isn't fun for anyone, except perhaps the person who lucked into owning all the properties? We've made it to that phase of the game.


We’ve been at that phase of the game for centuries if not longer. There is no easy fix


Google seems to want you to believe they are a Hanlon's Razor Schroedinger's Cat: the two most likely options are A) malice or B) incompetence. Their "well known" motto "Don't Be Evil" would have you believe it must entirely be incompetence, and so would Hanlon's Razor, normally. But with the number of smart people on staff how could they be so incompetent? Is it malice? Should we take Google on their "word" that they are simply incompetent on an amazing, heretofore undiscovered, scale, or maybe start to question if they are actively malevolent? Is the cat alive or dead? Who can observe it?


Did the cat meet its earnings target last quarter?


The constant product churn hasn't hurt ad revenue so why would they care? If they actually had to survive on some of these products they would change how they incentivized their employees.


Google has no incentive to improve this. Their revenue is unaffected by all of this.


In this specific case, I think it's more that they had numbers on use vs. abuse and decided it was too expensive to maintain.

There was no way to have those numbers until the feature existed, so of course it got built. But once it got deployed, oh well... The public didn't use it in a way that makes sense to maintain.


Some creators I follow have said they wanted to use community translations but didn't because the feature was underdeveloped. Particularly the fact that contributions are anonymous so there's no way to build trust in a particular translator, every translation for every video needs to be scrutinized and they just don't have time.

But from Googles beep boop robot analytics perspective they just see that nobody is using the feature and assume it's because nobody wants it.


It's almost like Google's product owners have no idea how to build and maintain comprehensive products. If people aren't using a feature, figure out why and can it if it's not being used because of a lack of interest instead of said feature being poorly implemented or maintained.

Does Google talk to anyone outside of their engineering bro culture?


Google Developers video [0] describing exactly how you should speak to users to get feedback: usability tests. This is pretty standard in the UX community. Here's Steve Krug, author of the Amazon top-selling book on web design "Don't Make Me Think," showing how to do it similarly [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YL0xoSmyZI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8

Edit: added Steve Krug video.


Yes, that would require them to actually talk to customers. This is anathema to their way of operating.


I don't know why you're assuming they didn't do this.


I don’t think this is a problem specific to google but the software industry in general. Showcasing your skills is a lot harder While you are maintaining something and it’s easier when you are building something new. And since the industry heavily penalises anyone who hasn’t “grown” over the years, the devs have a big incentive to keep building new things/Be involved in high visibility projects rather than be in a maintenance project.


I don't know about that particular channel, but particularly in the language-learning area with community sourcing, I've seen horrendous translations that do far more harm than good. Getting nouns completely wrong, tenses wrong, etc.

Probably because the people doing them are learning the language themselves, rather than fluent in it. And even advanced learners makes tons of mistakes.

It's one thing if a news article is sloppily translated but you can get the gist. It's a whole other thing when content is being used for learning and so you're actively learning wrong things.


For those like you who are gobsmacked, wondering what you’re missing, here it is:

The scale of YouTube has counterintuitive implications.

The harassment, deceptive self-promotion and trolling misuse of this feature was at such a scale that this feature was doing real harm that wasn’t effectively contained.

This is an issue Youtube has struggled with for years.

So, a feature that causes real harm, and brings real good, and at length they found no solution to the harm: the feature is quite reasonably axed.

And people who rely on the good faith usage of that abusable feature are justifiably disappointed...but we know why they did it.


Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I don't want when I’m driving along, looking for their sign. There’s enough “Denglish” (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers.

For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family name, and Stoffe is the first thing on their sign.


lol, that's terrible. And a great example of lacking context.

Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...


I don't understand the algorithm behind that at all. My YouTube is set to English; the UI is in English (but the "Edition" is still DE, because Geofencing). Most video titles are left alone, but some are translated - to German. Wat? Now you might think, it depends on the source language, English and German aren't translated, everything else is, but that's not the case. It's always just some, seemingly random, videos that get a translated title and description (I'm not sure if always both are translated, but I think not).


Same from English to Dutch, I wonder what triggers that, is it something the video owners has to enable? or does it only happen when there are good subtitles available (either community provided or auto-translated)


I've seen the same video appear with English title one day and with German title another day. I've also seen translated titles on Russian videos without any subtitles (I don't speak Russian, video was still interesting).

I suspect the suggestion/front page algorithm has a new branch, suggesting a small number of interesting-to-you foreign language videos with translated titles and adjusting from there.


Love to use opaque tools that are designed to randomly change functionality and presentation. I think as far as divination goes, dowsing rods are far more reliable


Same for random English to Swedish translations.


So that is what is happening sometimes on my YT... I live in Sweden but I'm not Swedish (can understand it but prefer English when possible), don't even have my Google account or YouTube set to Swedish so I have no idea it's translating them for me. Location-based perhaps but that would be a bit stupid.


Google does that for some products for us swedes as well which is very annoying since most of us are fluent in english. Even if it was in a language I don't speak I rather have it the native language because translating it often makes little sense and I can translate stuff myself when I need it, which isn't that often.

Often, the translation suck as well and doesn't make sense. Especially on youtube. I had to change my country of origin to make it disappear. Like, what's the point in translating a youtube video title if the video itself still is in english?

Or translating movie titles, which creates enormous confusion imo since it's not named a swedish name, it's often in english.


auto translate and location based results in general drive me up the wall. I always go to google.com/ncr because I really hate googling something in English and then getting a ton of German results that are super irrelevant.

On Bing this is somehow even worse, if you do a video search and you have the location setting wrong it just flatout doesn't show 90% of the reuslts for some queries.


I'm in canada and on only one device under the same account I constantly get French ads on youtube. My language settings are all English across all my devices, it's the same youtube account, but for some reason, only on the ps4 youtube app, I get French ads. No idea why, i've scoured every setting possible, I don't live in a French speaking part of canada, i've never watched French videos, never given google any indication I can speak French(which I can't), have never turned on any French language settings on the ps4, all language settings across everything is English from what I can tell, I just have no idea.


That's probably because you Germans capitalize all your nouns ;)


Google just wants to eliminate any remaining trust users have in them, don't they?

Every feature they remove, they do because it is a burden on feature velocity or maintenance. Fine, but why are they so bad at weighing it against long term trust? At this point, I expect the search box to search, Gmail to send emails, YouTube to host videos, maps to do navigation, and docs to edit docs. One core feature per platform, all other features will probably be dropped sooner or later.

It's a bad look, Google.


They’re getting hammered from the left for insufficient moderation of content, and from the right for overly aggressive moderation of content. It’s a lose-lose where the only real option is to remove extraneous features that enable users to upload content visible to others. Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there’s too much to moderate.


Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there’s too much to moderate.

If only Google had a half a trillion dollars to spend on something other that spying on people. And if only there were 35 million people out of work.

But, alas, poor sweet simple Google cannot possibly lie in the bed it made.


Ah, so in this version you have thirty-five million people who could agree on what is offensive. That's a daunting task without the "million" involved to begin with.


in this version you have thirty-five million people who could agree on what is offensive

Yes, because that's literally what the parent posited in his scenario:

"Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone"


The point is not to censor to match current sensibilities but to censor to push society in a direction. It doesn't matter if almost everyone hates what they're selling as long as they eventually push hard enough to sell it. They are, after all, an advertising company at heart.


When you get hired as a regulation enforcer in any other scenario, it’s not your opinion but the actual regulations that determine your recourse. If it’s up to the opinions of the enforcement regime, that’s because the rules are unclear or opaque.


The fact that you believe something like content moderation can be boiled down to some hard and fast regulations, let alone a set of regulations that people could agree on, is honestly kind of scary.


I've been on various forums with "moderation standards." The different moderators still have different approaches and different reputations for being a soft touch or heavy-handed. Human moderators, despite having standards or guidelines in front of them, are not consistent. When confronted about it, they will cite interpretations, "reading the room," discretion, and so on.

We have seen this scenario play out in censorship standards, various authorities, and so on over the decades. It never works as intended.


Google made the bed for free and others wanted to pee in it. The rest blamed Google for the bed having pee in it and demanded they do something, including post 24 hour guards around the bed.

I would take the bed away too.


Ah yes, YouTube, that product that Google made and that doesn't bring them any revenue. Two things that are definitely true.


You realize that revenue and profit are distinct?

Uber has massive revenues as do many other capital intensive businesses. That doesn't make them profitable.


Last time I checked, YouTube ads were a very profitable business.

The parent to your comment chose revenue likely to note that Google makes money from the bed ie. it's not a service given away for free.


Where did you check this? AFAIK YouTube profits (if any) are not broken out anywhere. At least not as of early this year:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...

Alphabet said YouTube ad revenue in the first quarter reached $4.7 billion, while cloud sales came in at $2.6 billion. The company broke those numbers out for the first time, but it’s still not disclosing profit figures for the units.


Yea, but anyone that owns a small business understands how you hide profit so you get taxed less.

Given how quickly and easily the axe comes down on sub par Google products, I highly doubt they'd keep YouTube if it wasn't profitable.


Is the definition of the word "free" another casualty of this era? It's literally free...


The bed referred to the community generated subtitles, not YouTube overall.


Some math shows that can't work. Half a trillion to 35 million is US$15,000 per person.

For one year. And people will complain that US$15,000 is not enough to live on.

What happens in year two?


Google goes bust?

That's not likely, is it?

Does Google have no concept of how YouTube drives ad sales and other synergies? Or of how much goodwill is worth?


Does any company make $500,000,000 a year?


That's a different argument. The justification for the removal was spam, no?


This seems in line with other recent actions like disabling comments on broad swaths of YouTube videos. The given reason may be spam but it looks like there’s a pattern of surface area reduction.


I have the demand that they stop their abusive tracking. Would they ever do that? No. So I guess they want to become TV to pacify advertisers.


Core problem is coupling "virality" and moderation. They're incompatible goals.

Remove the gamification and few would care that moderation lags.

The platforms try to mitigate virality with automated moderation. Anything to preserve that ad revenue.

The only societal fix is to slow down or break the engagement feedback loops. Something the platforms won't do voluntarily.


[flagged]


I didn’t say that there’s any legitimacy to the attacks from the right. But nonetheless they exist and they are a waste of resources to address and are a convenient excuse for a hostile government administration to harass the company.


Fair enough!


>Lots of people really have no principled philosophy of free speech beyond wanting their own privileged.

And similarly, a lot of people do have a principled philosophy of free speech, but it is built upon shaky grounds that are empirically or morally dubious or otherwise.


I think the issue of the right wing of politics being underrepresented in "the media" is deeply convoluted, too much to so easily dismiss entirely.

If "the media" only includes Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, then it's fairly even.

If "the media" also includes Hollywood and Silicon Valley, it becomes far less popular clear.


> Fine, but why are they so bad at weighing it against long term trust?

I want to remind the loss aversion and status quo bias. We tend to evaluate losses more important than they are, which is why for example it is hard to throw seldom used things away.

That said, why should feature removal mean automatic loss of trust? Because this feature is not important to me personally, it actually increases my trust that they can reorient their focus instead of churning man-hours on a feature just because it existed. Now I get it, it was an important feature for some people, and next day they might remove a feature that I find important, but in aggregate they clearly weighed its usage/perceived importance against removal decision.


Never heard the name "status quo bias" before, thanks for bringing that up.

I don't really care about this particular feature, but I do care about the trend. Why should a feature be sunset? It seems like this must be because of (a) bugs/maintenance burden or (b) a poor design or one that is mismatched with the current product direction. The fact that Google sunsets so many features and products suggests that both of these happen with high frequency. (b) is especially worrying, why can't they spend time before launching to figure out what they're going to do and commit to it? They aren't a small startup, they've got tons of resources. I'm sure they're trying, but whatever they're doing is not working, in my opinion.

For the record, I'm not a Google hater, but this is just so frustrating to watch as a user.


I totally sympathize with the frustration, and experience that as a user too. But I would like to suggest that digital product design is usually a moving target, based on constantly changing consumer engagement, competition and other market conditions, so they have to follow a dynamic, adaptive strategy. Now, could they commit on a feature despite these, yes of course, but that too many of such commitments will have a cost to us users in terms of lack of new innovation.

I imagine this picture; a “tech-smith” is building an elaborate, complicated machinery and we as the users are watching it, clapping to it, interacting with it. Some are asking “this machine should have bells”, some go “it should have whistles”, and the techsmith wants to add and remove those based on those parameters. In reality, no one knows what the final machine should look like and no one knows how exactly they will use it. So there is a sweet spot in which unexpected changes are budgeted for so that it can change to conform better to what we want and what we find useful as we gain experience with the machine. Which means sometimes the techsmith will need to go “you know what, I’m going to take this bell away because not many are using it and it is causing me problems, and instead I’ll use the materials and energy to add these extra wheels” even after having invested a lot to that bell initially (which is laudible, because they are also fighting against their own sunken cost fallacy).

This should be familiar to software engineers; “why the requirements were not perfect before I started writing the software” doesn’t work well in real life. In reality as the engineer and the user gain more experience with the system that is gradually emerging, they acquire new participatory knowledge of that system and that causes a change in requirements, in a dynamical, reciprocal fashion. (Which is one of the reasons why waterfall processes are not as popular today for most products). I think the same goes at a higher scale, if not complexity, for these comnplicated machinery big tech builds that is used by billions of people.


Except for the majority of users, eliminating spam and unmoderated content is far higher on the priority list than maintaining relatively niche features.

Whether it be Reddit or Facebook to YouTube, people are demanding security and greater tech company control over features.


But if you remove spam videos from yt is it still a niche feature?

I don't need captions that often but if I do not then half of them are community provided in my experience.

This is (unintentionally) again hitting against videos with useful content, compared to this endless slew of pointless (and often content wise incorrect) click bait videos.


This is an HN bubble framing. The masses that enjoy YouTube don't "trust" google, YouTube is just another large entertainment platform among many, "trust" never enters the equation, its just an entertainment website.


Google has a brand, just like other companies e.g. BMW and Costco. We associate these with things like "reliable", and "cheap", and "luxury".

I think "high feature churn" will become a part of Google's brand.


They are indirectly helping the community by prodding them to look for decentralized alternatives like peertube, lbry, etc. every now and then. They can't say it outright as they have to care about shareholder and corporate interests, etc. but even they know where the future lies internally!


IMO, subtitles from community contributions are a good way for me to enjoy foreign YouTube contents. Removing that is a bad news for people like me.

There are also a petition about this: https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove-community-c... But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube's decision.



The federation of peertube instances, which I feel will eventually be the most critical alternative of all:

https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances


I have a random question about peertube hope you guys dont mind.

Can I run a background task on my machine to help in some way with making the content of some instance more available to people, or would I have to run my own instance?


I think you can torrent the video and they should then also be served from your machine.


From this FAQ it looks like you may be able to as long as you torrent from something that is WebRTC friendly.

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...


I wasn't aware of the WebRTC requirement. Thanks


Which one of these provides community contributed captioning?


Better question: Which one of these even have a community?


Be the change you want to see. If all y'all do is sit around and complain that there isn't a community instead of joining the small community that already exists and growing it, well big surprise, it won't grow (at least not as quickly).


I personally don't care about youtube or other video communities. To me, youtube itself is good enough. It's been serving its purpose since the first day I visited it. I'd care less if they are monopoly or not.


everytime I visit sites like these, they're already infested with crypticurrency nuts, racists, conspiracy theorists, and all other manner of internet wack jobs


Are "internet wack jobs" not allowed a platform? There's certainly some content niche that they're filling for some people even if you disagree with them/dislike them.


Are "internet wack jobs" not allowed a platform?

They are, but if you aren't interested in that content, why would you be interested in joining communities where that is the focus?


when every alternative platform immediately gets filled with people who hold really despicable views, it's a hard pass for normal consumers to join

look at gab and voat


I am Deaf. Community-added subs are wonderful and a lot better than AI generated subs. However many of them suddenly stop a few minutes into the movie. It looks like subtitling was too much work and got abandoned.

But even so: Incomplete subs are better than AI generated subs.

AI generated subs are better than no subs. So I switch to AI subs when neccessary. This shows that incomplete subs are welcome to me!

I hope that Youtube reconsiders their decision.


Seems like they have enough resources to train their translation NN and speech-to-text NN. I don't think google has introduced those features for the users in the first place but they were a means to get training data.


Their automated CC sucks, always has, and I check multiple times a year only to see that it still sucks, most recently last month. I’ve never had the best hearing, so I usually turn CC on when I can, particularly with ESL speakers with heavy accents; but if the only option on a YouTube video is the automated captions, then the only option is crap and I’ll go without. On the other hand channels with a large dedicated fan base will often have fans contributing captions out of their own volition.

If they really think their NN is good enough to replace community contributed captions, I have yet to see evidence of this, and there’s no evidence in the announcement that this is a vote of confidence in their tech. If anything, it’s a vote against their ability to manage spam and abuse, they just don’t want to deal with it anymore.


Exactly same experience. Hearing disabled and using subtitles whenever I can. The generated ones are not good at all. The more unusual wording (i.e. full of technical terms or custom names) the worse it is.


To be fair, the Live Caption feature on Pixel phone (which can transcribe videos you are watching) is great. Maybe they plan on rolling that.


A lifetime of thinking that companies can reimplement cool tech they have in use somewhere else in a place that it would be even more useful has left me disappointed in the possibilities. I’m not familiar with Pixels because I don’t use them, but even if I took you at your word that it is automated captioning that works, I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will show up on YouTube just because Google has the tech on a Pixel.

It’s not like companies like Google have never had technical regressions either. Their core service, Google Search, is less useful to me than it was 10 years ago.


Search became less useful because it's optimizing for ad revenue, not user experience. I don't see that conflict of interest here. If anything, better subtitles would lead to more watch minutes (from non-natives) and hence more ad revenue.


So people with hearing problems need to buy a Google Pixel phone to enjoy their Google Youtube video? Smells very fishy to me.


Plus one to this. I was pleasantly surprised to the point of being spooked with the quality of transcriptions on my pixel phone.


Have you tried Google recorder app on Android? It's amazing.


I have not, but I responded to a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006491

but the tl;dr amounts to just because a company has the technology does not mean it is broadly applied across all of its services where it would be most useful. That said, if YouTube ever implements automated CC that works I’ll happily scarf down that humble pie.


Earlier today I watched a video of two people talking. Youtube decided it was in french and the transcript had less than one word per minute, all of them wrong.


[flagged]


Change? No. Show that the system is not up to snuff? Yes.


Then maybe they should roll those out first in usable quality and then get rid of manual ones?


Came here to say this


I have always wanted to edit the auto-generated subtitles and translations for some YouTube videos but never knew how. Perhaps the feature could be much more popular and really boost reach of some videos if they made it more visible and easy to use.


Ugh I follow a dutch guy (Master Milo) if he doesn't do the subs then one of his followers will. When watching on a tv or phone I rely on these subtitles as there is no option to auto translate the auto generated subtitles. This will be bad for him as it will no doubt have an affect on his viewing numbers and his revenue.


It is too bad that the automated speech to text isn’t good enough to allow them to turn this feature off without losing a great deal of high quality subtitling.


Writing high quality captions requires more than just knowing what they are saying, although that is a large part of it. Furthermore, knowing what they are saying may require more than just listening.

(I don't use YouTube, but this applies just as well to television.)


Even if they had captions, it would be impossible to translate certain things (e.g. lyrics, technical or scientific terms) to another language automatically well.


https://amara.org/en/ is an alternative service, but probably even less discoverable for most viewers.


Is there any way for me as a creator to pipe in subtitles from that service automatically into YouTube’s captions? Because then you could have one person go there, write the subtitles, have the creator approve it and then all of the viewers can see them.


You can enable the YT integration if you are the owner of the channel.

https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-l...


> This feature was rarely used

Seriously? Without the subtitles from fans, I can't really count how many great content I will miss, especially for relative niche languages.


I can totally see this abused for channels / topics with toxic communities. Personally, I've only seen this work largely as intended. Overall, it's a net loss, I don't really see many communities replacing this feature by coordinating with the creator. Frequently, videos I watch doesn't even get automated transcription feature - there's a lot of good foreign content out there.


Between that and the ads becoming completely obtrusive, cutting my video at random moments, I really wish there was another alternative. I don't have TV for years any more, and Youtube has become the new TV.


This is why YouTube needs to be spun off from Google: because there are alternatives to YouTube (Vimeo, P2P streaming), but good luck finding an alternative to YouTube.


YouTube runs at a loss. If it was spun off from google it would not be viable.


as far as I'm aware nobody has ever shown this, all analysis I've seen that lead to that conclusion are based on ideas that Google pays Tier 1 provider rates for Youtube bandwidth, which is definitely not true (Google is directly peered with pretty much every ISP on earth)


There are some sources. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_go...

I still believe Google has a LARGE interest in owning it though. Obviously. It's simply maybe not good enough in itself


I don't know. The content is not there on other services and my experience of the app is horrendous.

I'd rather turn myself to twitch or netflix to fulfill most of my youtube needs.

And as you say, they won't spun it off, it justs teaches too much about us and is the perfect ad delivery platform for them :s.


Somehow this minor feature stands as proof for me that Google doesn’t know its customers and doesn’t care. And yet they will be financially successful. Maybe they are too big.


To be fair, this sentence could be valid in regard of most big tech companies. Take for example the ESC button of Apple, or nearly any UI redesigns of Facebook, the [whatever Ballmer's Microsoft used to do with Windows] for Microsoft, and so on.

Having said that, I agree that Google should know better. They base their entire strategy on pure data, but I fear that in this way they are forgetting to factor in things that are not (yet) measurable or measured.


Is it me or does it seem like a lot less content is getting autogenerated English captions? Maybe the backlog is growing, but I've been used to all new content being captioned, but am surprised when new uploads aren't captioned.


No, they are removing the ability to create them. The existing contributions will remain.


"Community Contributions" is the name of the feature, but the title could be phrased better


Not quite. It seems like creators have until September 28 to choose to publish existing community contributions, and if they don't, it seems like they will all disappear. That's how I interpret, "You have until September 28, 2020 to publish your community contributions before they’re removed."


https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en

    If you have contributions currently saved as drafts, these will be available for the next 60 days (until Sept 28 2020), and you have until then to publish them before they’re removed. Any already published contributions (titles, descriptions, captions, etc) will continue to show up on videos and can be managed by Creators in YouTube Studio.


IIRC this was basically what they said when annotations become unavailable to new videos. They're completely gone now, so probably a year or so until community contributions are completely wiped.


Ah, okay, thanks for explaining!


I've done some translating on YouTube. What it means is if your translation is in draft mode (you're still working on it) on 9/28 it will disappear. The video creator shouldn't need to do anything here.


Ah, okay, thanks for explaining!


Rather ironic that Google is having a problem with spam.


The old school technique was youtube-dl coupled with a separate search for subs.


RIP Kizuna AI community subbed videos


YouTube marked a huge shift on the internet. But of course all good things come to an end. It was an incredible free service that I loved and still love so much. Not to say it's going away but ye I do notice cracks in the facade .. it's no longer the new thing or even the current moment it is showing its age


I'm partly happy and sad at the same time. 90% of the people in the Netherlands speek english and go to universities that are also fully english. When you suddenly see your favorite content with strange dutch translations it makes it worse (for me atleast) I would just have hoped that they would allow individual users to disable the community changes. When translating things there where always a lot of personal touches or words that where on purpose translated to something more funny in the other language. I always had the feeling there really was a person typing those translations. I understand why google would like to automate this. I just hoped that they would allow users to specify if they want to keep the personal translation the automated translation or nothing at al or a mix for example a option to never translate titles.


Yet another cool feature lost to the fact that the YouTube "community" is a toxic swamp.


This is the real problem. None of the other conspiracy theories, "Google is evil", profit-based claims, etc. are the cause. The problem is that people are horrible, awful, disgusting monsters, and letting them communicate on the Internet in public forums is a terrible idea.

HN is literally the only public forum I use, and only because it's small enough and obscure enough that most of the trolls stay away, and a couple moderators can keep it usable.

Yahoo removed comments, ridding the world of one of the larger cesspools. Reddit's entire raison d'être is to serve as a fetid pool of the worst the Internet has to offer.

We can't have nice things because we don't deserve nice things.


And now just imagine Google managing Wikipedia.

"Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title/descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we’re removing them to focus on other creator tools."

With this rationale all wikis must close down. But no, they don't. They started to fight spam technically. And if I remember Google was also pretty good in this spamfighting niche, with Gmail, decades ago. Nowadays with YouTube and News shutting down apparently not anymore. Those Google PMs really made a name of themselves as worlds worst.


People have been "contributing" legit looking subtitles and then inserting some spam in the middle for self promotion. Most big youtube channels e.g. pewdiepie has disabled community contributed subtitles.


One possible solution is to make it very clear that the subtitles were not written by the video poster. Something like a red triangle next to the language name.


This looks like a great opportunity for a new startup. There have been past annotation features disabled by YouTube as well.

My guess is YouTube wants to take a step towards broadcasting online instead of community videos.


I saw earlier in the discussion about the new Australian media laws re: Google’s use of news articles, a googler explain that Google News still exists as a gesture of good will from the company; as a service that costs them a rounding error, that some subset of users still use and enjoy, is something they keep doing just because they can.

I wonder how they would explain this.


Someone will write: "Google continues the war against its own users".


[flagged]


Gmail doesn’t filter spam all that reliably either.


In my experience, it's almost as reliable as a powered off computer, both at filtering spam and at delivering legitimate mail.


> Once you have same language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.

Oh so they realized it's free labour and whant the users to train their speech recognition AI.


And much like Google 411 they are probably killing it now that their model has reached a saddle point with spam removal costs.


Google is a f*kng machine learning company, they do things randomly just an "artificial intelligence" would do. I wonder if there are executives left making any decision other than where to move the money.




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