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YouTube will delete existing video annotations on January 15, 2019
- kasparsklavins 8y agoGood. 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 8y agois 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
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoTypical 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.
- honestoHeminway 8y agoShould offer the option to "bake" them into the video- and auto-merge links into the description. Well its google- they do not get paid for thinking.
- devwastaken 8y agoAgreed. Youtube is always traveling further away from being a technology that benefits us into something that only entertains.
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- snaky 8y agoThat'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 8y agoBut annotations aren't hard to use, just the opposite. Google is removing them because they don't really work that well on mobile.
- snaky 8y agoThey have dedicated YouTube mobile app to make it work really well on mobile, you know. With dedicated team of developers.
- RugnirViking 8y agoNot to mention they also have dedicated entire mobile ecosystem and operating system as well as significant leverage even in other phone ecosystems
- agumonkey 8y agomobile first is pretty nasty, but it's probably unavoidable business wise since smartphones are the new mainstream
- snaky 8y ago'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 8y ago
- ehsankia 8y ago> but I often see them effectively used to correct inaccuracies Do you? Considering it was removed as a feature 2 years ago? I've not seen any in a long time. Yes if you go back and watch old videos, but as time pass, the % of people watching such videos will keep on shrinking, especially if you add the fact that views are increasingly moving to mobile anyway. The code complexity on the player will stop being worth it at some point, just to serve 0.01% of views on annotated videos.
- Moru 8y agoYes, I saw one just last week (No, I don't watch much youtube :-). Some people are putting up instructions how to do things that isn't really done any more, to try to save the knowledge for later generations. One can argue how well a choice of youtube is for that but the fact is that many have no other way of getting that information out to a wider audience. I think it's a great way to catch the few that might be interested before the knowledge dies out. Trying to find anyone interested in your little village is usually very hard.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoYou can find 10 year old cat videos on YT. Video hosting isn't cheap, yet YT never deletes videos even if nobody watches them. Its a free service. Honestly Google is better than most digital file lockers out there.
- maceurt 8y agoI cant wrap my head around how good youtube is keeping, serving, and querying massive amounts of video data so well. I don't know how a site like youtube is even possible.
- rhacker 8y agoI wonder if anyone has done the math at google if they can keep up. Each video is between 100MB to tens of GB I imagine, especially high-def ones. As more people come into the internet age, and more people start creating video content, the number of publishers, times the average number of videos a publisher makes over a lifetime, etc.. Same with Vimeo - the numbers have got to be astronomically slanted in favor of a cataclysmic loss of data at some point, or simply a policy of deleting things 10 years old (deemed no longer relevant). The internet archive is going to have its hands full if it's trying to back this thing up.
- maceurt 8y agoI mean to some degree videos that don't show up in search results and aren't linked anywhere are basically none existant anyway. I don't know why a site like youtube still serves videos like that. Youtube could remove at least 20% of their videos and not affect almost any users, but I don't know if it will ever come to that. The math is just absurd considering the amount of storage that youtube will have to serve 10, 20 years from now.
- neotek 8y agoI'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.
- digianarchist 8y agoSame here. Just like ads people abused them so I turned them off.
- have_faith 8y agoDitto. I can't remember a single instance I needed to turn them on for any reason.
- colmvp 8y agoIt'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 8y ago>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.
- mdonahoe 8y agoGood 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 8y agoIt's probably more now - that stat was from years ago when they first turned off the ability to add annotations.
- snaky 8y agoInstead of making annotations useful on mobile UI.
- ggggtez 8y agoNow 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 8y agoIf I can shrink a video to 400 pixels wide on desktop, then there's plenty of space on mobile.
- FractalParadigm 8y agoIt doesn't surprise me at all tbh, in fact I expected that would have been a lot higher. How many kids are watching YouTube on mommy's iPad throughout the day? I know my roommate likes to have video guides and such playing when he's gaming, it's just easier to have his phone propped up than mucking around switching between the game and a web browser. Recipes, DIY projects, tutorials, I can think of a million use cases where YouTube is just more viable and easier to access on a mobile device than a laptop or desktop
- arkitaip 8y ago
- nickm12 8y agoGood 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?
- stencil25 8y agoVideo 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 8y agoAnnotations 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.
- Double_a_92 8y agoThat would reset the views and comments.
- jerrre 8y agoThen you loose/cut off all previous comments/views/likes
- saurik 8y agoThey would have to upload it to a new URL and so none of the links to the old video would see it anyway, which is kind of useless.
- pinum 8y agoCreators 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 8y agoThey don't need to delete the old version, they can link between new/old version in the description.
- buboard 8y agothat 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.
- philliphaydon 8y agoNow if only end cards showed at the end and not before it’s about to end.
- azurezyq 8y agoAs a user I really cannot remember a case that annotation helped me...mostly just ads and spams..
- olivierlacan 8y agoYou'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.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/55770?co=GENIE.Pla... 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.
- wild_preference 8y agoVideo URLs always pointing to the same content is a critical guarantee for a service like Youtube.
- kasparsklavins 8y agoI'm sure there's no way that could be abused.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agoI think that it is great that they do not give the ability to replace the video. If I am linking a video that I watched in the past to someone I expect it to contain what I watched, not something entirely different. Same for upvotes, what if someone replaces a video with content that I find misleading and that I would not have up voted?
- jakeogh 8y agoIf I send a someone a video it should not be ambigious if we saw the same thing.
- jakobegger 8y agoI 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?
- saurik 8y agoI 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 :(.
- solarkraft 8y ago> and that mobile users couldn't see them... Which is ENTIRELY on Google.
- samwillis 8y agoI think it’s more to do with Apple actually. I don’t believe google could place them on a full screen video on iOS.
- hvidgaard 8y agoAbsolutely nothing prevents Youtube from embedding the annotations in the video for playback on restricted devices.
- setquk 8y agoYou can't and never could do so why implement it?
- read_if_gay_ 8y agoThe youtube app has its own frontend for video playback.
- stevenicr 8y agoTrying 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?
- Walkman 8y ago> "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 8y agoAre people clicking on ads/end screen survey things/anything on a video that is not play/pause with any greater frequency than this?
- ggggtez 8y agoGood riddance. 99% of the time annotations were spam as far as I know. Using them for actual annotations seemed to be a rarity.
- wiseleo 8y agoHmm... 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 8y agoI found a way, pretty straight forward: https://www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo?features=1&legacy=1&video_id=VIDEO_ID https://www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo?features=1&legac...
- hardwaresofton 8y ago> 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
- kennydude 8y agoGoodbye all the "Choose your own adventure" videos on YouTube as most of them, if not all, will no longer work properly :(
- Midnightas 8y agoI (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 8y agoThen would be better to archive the videos too, because the next logical step for YouTube would be delete all the old low profile videos.
- edsu 8y agoIs there a good listing of these, or could we crowdsource one quiclky to make sure they are at Internet Archive?
- cjlm 8y agoNot exhaustive but https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/ https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/
- h2onock 8y agoI'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 8y agoContentID would flag you for self-plagiarism (pun intended) and disable further uploads.
- Keverw 8y agoI 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 8y agoAll content on the YouTube content library has already been fingerprinted.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gregknicholson 8y agoChad's garage is becoming really unprofessional... https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
- yoz-y 8y agoDifference 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 8y agoRight, 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.
- pluma 8y agoThat's not really a matching analogy. YouTube doesn't just store videos, YouTube promotes videos via its algorithm and it monetises them, giving you a kickback on any ads you let it place on them. It's not in the "video hosting business", yes, but that doesn't mean it's not a business. Content creators aren't the customer, they're more like contractors.
- anticensor 8y agoContent creators are contractees. YouTube is in the video hosting business, advertisement is an (rather profitable) enablement over that.
- sbhn 8y agoThis 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.
- kuroguro 8y agoIt'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 8y agoannotations were a highly versatile tool in the right hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTHYkauWUg&t=0s&list=PLf45oJhfmhbIbRomd9-aM1JGtnrytKz9G&index=7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTHYkauWUg&t=0s&list=PLf45o... i think too many people just experienced poorly used ones that were more akin to a popup ad.
- hpbd 8y agoI 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.
- neeraga 8y agoWhich means you can't add outbound external links on top of YouTube videos from now on.
- anjc 8y agoThis 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.
- archi42 8y agoUhm, 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 8y agoyoutube-dl will archive annotations to XML with the --write-annotations flag. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl
- b_tterc_p 8y agoAs someone who’s small consumption of YouTube is its community of horror ARGs, this is going to bust a handful of them. Sad.
- garysahota93 8y agoThank 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 8y agoI agree - pretty much the first thing I do when starting a YT video is disable annotations.
- mattigames 8y agoonly on very low quality videos or pirated music videos.
- wnevets 8y agoAs 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.
- posedge 8y agoThank you. I hate the annotations, they are so badly misused. It sounded like a good feature in theory though.
- quadrangle 8y agoSo, 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…