4 ms·

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 c

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.

honestoHeminway 8y ago
Should 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 ago
Agreed. Youtube is always traveling further away from being a technology that benefits us into something that only entertains.
deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
snaky 8y ago
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 8y ago
  But 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 ago
    They have dedicated YouTube mobile app to make it work really well on mobile, you know. With dedicated team of developers.
    - RugnirViking 8y ago
      Not to mention they also have dedicated entire mobile ecosystem and operating system as well as significant leverage even in other phone ecosystems
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    mobile 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
        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.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      It's not because of "mobile first", which could just as easily manifest as adding the feature to mobile ASAP.
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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

Should 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 ago

Agreed. Youtube is always traveling further away from being a technology that benefits us into something that only entertains.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

snaky 8y ago

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 8y ago
But 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 ago
  They have dedicated YouTube mobile app to make it work really well on mobile, you know. With dedicated team of developers.
  - RugnirViking 8y ago
    Not to mention they also have dedicated entire mobile ecosystem and operating system as well as significant leverage even in other phone ecosystems
- agumonkey 8y ago
  mobile 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
      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.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    It's not because of "mobile first", which could just as easily manifest as adding the feature to mobile ASAP.

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 ago
Yes, 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 ago

You 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.