
YouTube will delete existing video annotations on January 15, 2019 - ivank
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7342737
======
saurik
I have seen a number of (like, many many) videos where annotations were used
for corrections on the content, so now all of that content is going to be
wrong :(.

I realize that these things are sometimes annoying, and that mobile users
couldn't see them... but they existed, and were part of the content--in many
cases I have seen, because the video publisher didn't know how to do editing
and so used the annotation feature to do it instead--and now that content is
going to be damaged, forever.

FWIW, this was effectively the only way to fix content after it had been
posted without changing the URL... something you would expect to be a critical
feature of any publishing platform, _and one that Google themselves has used
at times and offered to close partners because clearly they need that feature
themselves_ , but which YouTube doesn't really provide and apparently has now
decided to provide even less :(.

~~~
Meai
In my opinion they should print all the annotations with their respective
times to the description of the videos that still have them, with a remark
like

"Google Backup of annotations:

03:01-3:35 annotation text content"

~~~
Sniffnoy
Note that that won't suffice for the purposes mentioned above, as oftentimes
the annotation would, say, replace a specific word in the text; the replacing
word by itself won't be very meaningful, as you won't know what it was
intended to replace.

~~~
profalseidol
How about adding the coordinates in the screen that it replaces? Some
percentage distance from top left.

~~~
franga2000
Even I couldn't reliably determine which word was replaced given screen
coordinates, and I spend half my time pushing pixels around (web design &
photography).

~~~
teraflop
Yeah, in order for this to be usable, it would need a better UI. Maybe some
kind of overlay: it could automatically position the annotations at the
correct position relative to the video, and make them appear and disappear at
the appropriate times.

I wonder if implementing something like that would be technically feasible.

~~~
fjsolwmv
You are proposing rebuilding the existing feature Google wants to turn off.

~~~
NullPrefix
That's the joke

------
olivierlacan
You'd think Google would prioritize shipping the ability to replace the
underlying video file for a video since it's impossible to do so:
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/55770?co=GENIE.Pla...](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/55770?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en)

But no. You can trim your video. You can delete it entirely, and suffer the
consequences. But you can't simply fix and replace a video that may have had
erroneous content and videos which had been "patched" by annotations in the
past will now appear without context (aside from descriptions perhaps).

That's some impressively lousy product stewardship, and I say this as someone
who mostly disliked annotations as most people here seem to.

~~~
jakobegger
I totally understand that youtube doesn't want people replacing video files.
That feature would be abused like hell.

What's wrong with uploading a new video "Original Title [Update Nov 2018]",
and linking to that in the description?

~~~
rocqua
View counts, and any learning 'the algorithm' has done to understand how
popular the original title was, get lost.

~~~
SifJar
But if it was allowed, view counts & popularity learning could be assigned to
a completely different video that is uploaded as an "edit"

~~~
verroq
How is that different to just allowing editing of the video content itself?

~~~
gkoberger
They're saying you could upload a pirated episode of Game of Thrones, get 100k
views, switch the content and title to "My Newest Vlog!", and keep the views.

~~~
jstanley
But you can do exactly that on your own website, and for some reason we don't
have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs. Why would it be different on
YouTube?

~~~
vthriller
> for some reason we don't have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs

I've seen a number of social network groups being sold for their audiences and
then rebranded to sell questionable things. I've even seen something similar
done to some YouTube channel I once subscribed to: its owner (new or not,
can't really tell this time) changed its name/images/whatever, removed all the
videos and started publishing things that I never wanted to be in my feed.
Things will only get worse the moment YouTube allows to change videos under
the same URL.

~~~
claudiawerner
I'm led to believe this is also common on Reddit; someone (or a bot) will
repost to karma farm, then the account with high karma is sold off. I'm not
sure how much there is to gain from that since you don't see users' karma
unless you specifically view their profile.

~~~
softawre
Reddit "trusts" accounts with high karma in various ways.

------
stencil25
Video Annotations were frequently used to update mistakes made within a video,
such as when the producer simply got a date or statistic incorrect, as well as
for providing a future citation or update regarding the content of the video.

I think it would be nice to see a middleground feature, to facilitate these
cases, whilst not being as easy to abuse as video annotations were.

~~~
jakobegger
Annotations are a quick and dirty fix that isn't really a fix at all.

It's really confusing if the voice in the video says one thing, and an
annotation is displayed that says "this is not actually correct ..."

It would be much better if the video creator spent five minutes to actually
fix the video and reupload it.

~~~
pinum
Creators are strongly disincentivised from doing that since deleting the old
version would throw away their views etc for that video. It would also delete
comments, and while this is often no great loss, I do run across useful or
interesting YouTube comments sometimes.

~~~
jakobegger
They don't need to delete the old version, they can link between new/old
version in the description.

~~~
tastroder
That sounds like a solution I'd personally never even notice. Most of the
devices I consume youtube videos on either do not show the video description
at all (TV) or actively disencourage reading it (the official Android app
currently requires one or two clicks to even see it).

In addition to that, re-uploads are annoying enough as is because content
creators constantly need to upload old content due to changes in Youtubes
policies or enforcement. New revisions for any minor mistake instead of an
overlay would properly ruin the subscription page imho.

------
not_kurt_godel
Typical Google, very little respect for long-term user investment in their
products. Lots of annotations are annoying but I often see them effectively
used to correct inaccuracies in instructional & educational videos. Will be
sad to see those go.

~~~
snaky
That's not exactly Google's problem. That's '80-20 economy' for you, AKA
dictate of majority. If some feature is too hard for 80 per cent of users,
tough luck for 20 per cent who used it.

The typical Google is the decision to _delete_ annotations instead of just
turn it off by default.

~~~
arkitaip
But annotations aren't hard to use, just the opposite. Google is removing them
because they don't really work that well on mobile.

~~~
agumonkey
mobile first is pretty nasty, but it's probably unavoidable business wise
since smartphones are the new mainstream

~~~
snaky
'Mobile first' is not equal to 'remove all the features and add white fields
and huge padding everywhere'. E.g. WeChat is not only 'mobile first', but
second, third and fourth, from the day one. And from the day one all the
WeChat team do is adding new features, not removing old ones.

~~~
agumonkey
you got the idea, when a company allocates resources for mobile, the rest gets
less, ultimately that's N platforms to support, and the less platforms, the
less costs.

------
neotek
I've had annotations switched off for years now, they're almost always
completely irrelevant to the content I'm trying to watch, and often just get
in the way.

~~~
colmvp
It's unfortunate, but the reason why I turned them off is because of a large
number of uploaders who abused annotations with stupid annoying messages that
added nothing to the video.

It sucks for creators who legitimately used it as corrections for videos but
all in all, I think doing away with annotations is a net positive for the user
experience.

~~~
neotek
>the reason why I turned them off is because of a large number of uploaders
who abused annotations with stupid annoying messages that added nothing to the
video.

Same here, 99% of the time it's just a big annotation that covers the whole
video that says something like "click here for my latest viral video" or "get
[brand name] shoes 50% off" and so on.

------
stevenicr
Trying to remember how many of these I have seen via places like coursera,
freecodecamp videos, edx, udemy and the like.

Again google goes after spam with a bazooka instead of a scalpel - collateral
damage - meh. The spammers will just edit the video before uploading and those
who don't won't get the annotations.

But I get it, at that scale it's probably impossible to one by one surgery the
issue.

Perhaps a link to offer information to see annotation that were removed (and
the time stamp) in case important info conveyed is being removed?

------
kennydude
Goodbye all the "Choose your own adventure" videos on YouTube as most of them,
if not all, will no longer work properly :(

~~~
Midnightas
I (or someone) needs to archive all those annotations links on those games,
since most of these old channels that did such videos aren't active anymore.

~~~
snaky
Then would be better to archive the videos too, because the next logical step
for YouTube would be delete all the old low profile videos.

------
kuroguro
It's really a shame for videos where annotations were used interactively for
menus as timestamp jumps or jumping around different videos with "alternative
endings" etc. So much effort seems to have gone into them :<

Random example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wgFn8WW5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wgFn8WW5c)

~~~
odessacubbage
annotations were a highly versatile tool in the right hands.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTHYkauWUg&t=0s&list=PLf45o...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTHYkauWUg&t=0s&list=PLf45oJhfmhbIbRomd9-aM1JGtnrytKz9G&index=7)
i think too many people just experienced poorly used ones that were more akin
to a popup ad.

------
nickm12
Good riddance. As a user, I hate annotations. I'm sure there are good uses,
but in the use cases I see them, they're just use for spamming or distracting
from the video.

Still, I see lots of new videos with annotations. Is it really impossible to
create new annotations?

------
buboard
that is a crime. lots of lectures and tutorial videos have corrrections that
fix the errors in the video. good luck with the new 'fake news' now. One
wonders why is youtube destroying its own collection like that? They are
weaving a string of failures so massive that only anti-monopoly action might
save the poor makers now.

------
anjc
This is absolutely bizarre. Why can't they just leave the option to view old
ones there, but disallow new annotations? Secondly, why are they using click-
through rate as a metric to gauge usefulness? In instructional videos
annotations tend to be informative rather than something to click on.

------
philliphaydon
Now if only end cards showed at the end and not before it’s about to end.

------
kasparsklavins
Good.

Although it has a valid use case, most of the time I interact with annotations
is when trying to pause a video and ending up being redirected to some other
video or a 3rd party site.

~~~
type0
is this annotations or links? I thought links has been already removed for
quite some time. Annotations has been very useful especially for adding
factual corrections after the live stream

------
hardwaresofton
> As adoption of end screens and cards has grown, the use of annotations has
> decreased by over 70%. For this reason, we discontinued annotations editor
> in May 2017.

> This means you can no longer add new or edit existing annotations, only
> delete them. Existing annotations still show when using a desktop computer.

I guess everyone's known about this for a while. I guess it's a shitty move
for the users, surely most channels have been sufficiently warned since they
started removing the feature so long ago

------
azurezyq
As a user I really cannot remember a case that annotation helped me...mostly
just ads and spams..

~~~
Flenser
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I&t=50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I&t=50)
Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)

------
sbhn
This video has a UI built using annotations.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7WPLhbPao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7WPLhbPao)

They are buttons that fwd or rwd the video to a point where the white strobe
flash matches the text on the button, doh, I mean annotation.

Note: Only works on desktop YouTube.

------
wiseleo
Hmm... OK... I guess I will add that feature to my video platform that adds
features to YouTube videos. Do we have a way to extract annotations via API?
Probably...

~~~
edgartaor
I found a way, pretty straight forward:

[https://www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo?features=1&legac...](https://www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo?features=1&legacy=1&video_id=VIDEO_ID)

------
mdonahoe
Good riddance. Though interesting tidbit

>> With 60% of YouTube’s watch time now on mobile

That surprised me at first, though upon reflection, it aligns with my own use
I think.

~~~
mathw
It's probably more now - that stat was from years ago when they first turned
off the ability to add annotations.

~~~
snaky
Instead of making annotations useful on mobile UI.

~~~
ggggtez
Now that I think about it though, due to fine size minimums, the placement
would probably be messed up even if it worked. I imagine that's part of the
problem with just adapting it.

~~~
Dylan16807
If I can shrink a video to 400 pixels wide on desktop, then there's plenty of
space on mobile.

------
b_tterc_p
As someone who’s small consumption of YouTube is its community of horror ARGs,
this is going to bust a handful of them. Sad.

------
archi42
Uhm, I can see what they're aiming at. But there a lot of legacy videos which
have useful information in the annotations. I think 80% of the car repair
videos I watched the last month had annotations with nice details, and I can
see this information going down into the limbo.

So, is there any tool to dump these annotations for later use?

~~~
schiffern
youtube-dl will archive annotations to XML with the --write-annotations flag.

[https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl)

------
posedge
Thank you. I hate the annotations, they are so badly misused. It sounded like
a good feature in theory though.

------
h2onock
I'm quite pleased to hear that they're being removed as they do my head in. If
I owned videos that relied on the annotations and I wasn't in a position to
re-record them then I'd probably screen record the videos with the annotations
switched on and re-upload them.

~~~
anticensor
ContentID would flag you for self-plagiarism (pun intended) and disable
further uploads.

~~~
Keverw
I believe ContentID only detects videos registered in their database by
partners through what they call the "CMS".

Basically you upload your videos, and meta data for what they call reference
files. Which I doubt are publically viewable.

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3244015?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3244015?hl=en)

Plus if it automatically matched videos already uploaded would cause a mess
because so many channels use royalty free music or content library... So then
everyone would claim they own music they don't really own.

~~~
anticensor
All content on the YouTube content library has already been fingerprinted.

------
garysahota93
Thank god! I know this was intended to be a useful feature, but it's caused me
nothing but spam over the years. So glad it's gone!

~~~
favorited
I agree - pretty much the first thing I do when starting a YT video is disable
annotations.

------
quadrangle
So, it's totally impossible to simply retrieve the contents of the annotations
now??

What good is a "delete" button if the data is inaccessible otherwise and will
just be deleted later anyway‽

Please, if anyone knows how to just download the text, I'd appreciate it. I'm
one of those people who used annotations to add corrections and clarifications
to educational videos…

------
ggggtez
Good riddance. 99% of the time annotations were spam as far as I know. Using
them for actual annotations seemed to be a rarity.

------
wnevets
As someone who has disabled them on the desktop and was never able to view
them on the chromecast, I understand why would they get rid of them. Often
they were used to push adverts or other non-sense rather than error correction
or anything useful.

------
neeraga
Which means you can't add outbound external links on top of YouTube videos
from now on.

------
Walkman
> "on average they close 12 annotations before they click on one of them."

Yes, and that is only by accident because I couldn't fucking click on the X
because you put it on the corner on purpose. I'm really glad they will go
away!

~~~
bhandziuk
Are people clicking on ads/end screen survey things/anything on a video that
is not play/pause with any greater frequency than this?

------
hpbd
I was wondering why they hadn't implemented video annotations for their mobile
apps yet, I guess I have an answer now lol

Fuck Google by the way, I know of many videos that will lose their meaning
without annotations.

------
gregknicholson
Chad's garage is becoming _really_ unprofessional...

[https://xkcd.com/1150/](https://xkcd.com/1150/)

~~~
yoz-y
Difference though is that although video creators are not paying youtube, they
are the reason people bother to show up and watch ads there in the first
place.

Of course this shifts incentives a lot but it gives you some ground to be
legitimately angry.

~~~
nathanyz
Right, YouTube buys and sells human attention. I imagine they did a
cost/benefit analysis and feel like this change is a net positive for that
business.

If users were paying for video hosting with specific features, then legacy
support would likely be a higher priority. Different customer, different
concerns.

