16 ms·

YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

355 points by zhamisen 6y ago

pen2l 6y ago
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
- girvo 6y ago
  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.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  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.
- julianlam 6y ago
  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.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    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.
    - jsheard 6y ago
      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.
      - packetlost 6y ago
        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?
        coliveira 6y ago
        Yes, that would require them to actually talk to customers. This is anathema to their way of operating.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        I don't know why you're assuming they didn't do this.
        richardbrevig 6y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YL0xoSmyZI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8 Edit: added Steve Krug video.
- blueboo 6y ago
  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.
deadalus 6y ago
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- glenstein 6y ago
  The federation of peertube instances, which I feel will eventually be the most critical alternative of all: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
  - dreen 6y ago
    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?
    - RealStickman_ 6y ago
      I think you can torrent the video and they should then also be served from your machine.
      - glenstein 6y ago
        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#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-run-peertube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...
        RealStickman_ 6y ago
        I wasn't aware of the WebRTC requirement. Thanks
- 6y ago
toohotatopic 6y ago
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.
- aabhay 6y ago
  Came here to say this
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  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.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that your anecdote is sufficient to meaningfully change YouTube's strategy around speech-to-text?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Change? No. Show that the system is not up to snuff? Yes.
- SllX 6y ago
  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.
jxramos 6y ago
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.
twirlock 6y ago
>fuck you, deaf people t. parody of an evil corporation
sriku 6y ago
Rather ironic that Google is having a problem with spam.
082349872349872 6y ago
The old school technique was youtube-dl coupled with a separate search for subs.
throwawaysea 6y ago
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.
- ghego1 6y ago
  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.
totetsu 6y ago
https://amara.org/en/ https://amara.org/en/ is an alternative service, but probably even less discoverable for most viewers.
- easton 6y ago
  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.
  - FranOntanaya 6y ago
    You can enable the YT integration if you are the owner of the channel. https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-linking-youtube-and-amara-accounts https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-l...
verroq 6y ago
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.
- gjvnq 6y ago
  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.
darthoctopus 6y ago
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.
- scoopertrooper 6y ago
  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.
- dathinab 6y ago
  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).
- nindalf 6y ago
  > 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?
  - 6y ago
dirtyid 6y ago
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.
pacamara619 6y ago
> 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.
- metiscus 6y ago
  And much like Google 411 they are probably killing it now that their model has reached a saddle point with spam removal costs.
birdyrooster 6y ago
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.
- zzo38computer 6y ago
  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.)
- ipsum2 6y ago
  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.
llacb47 6y ago
No, they are removing the ability to create them. The existing contributions will remain.
- notRobot 6y ago
  "Community Contributions" is the name of the feature, but the title could be phrased better
- pwinnski 6y ago
  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."
  - llacb47 6y ago
    https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en 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.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      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.
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      Ah, okay, thanks for explaining!
  - frei 6y ago
    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.
uluyol 6y ago
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.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  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.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    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.
- acituan 6y ago
  > 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.
  - 6y ago
liability 6y ago
Google, the company that runs gmail, can't filters a little spam? That's their excuse for removing accessibility features? What utter shitheads.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Gmail doesn’t filter spam all that reliably either.
  - owl57 6y ago
    In my experience, it's almost as reliable as a powered off computer, both at filtering spam and at delivering legitimate mail.
ganfortran 6y ago
> 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.
maple3142 6y ago
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-captions-from-youtube https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove-community-c... But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube's decision.
cyberpsybin 6y ago
RIP Kizuna AI community subbed videos
jlengrand 6y ago
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.
- 1f60c 6y ago
  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.
  - jlengrand 6y ago
    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.
  - qtplatypus 6y ago
    YouTube runs at a loss. If it was spun off from google it would not be viable.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      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)
      - jlengrand 6y ago
        There are some sources. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_google_runs_youtube_at_a_loss/ 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
niffydroid 6y ago
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.
MandieD 6y ago
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.
- detaro 6y ago
  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...
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Same for random English to Swedish translations.
    - piva00 6y ago
      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.
  - polytely 6y ago
    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)
    - wongarsu 6y ago
qwerty456127 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
j45 6y ago
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.
znpy 6y ago
Someone will write: "Google continues the war against its own users".
shadowgovt 6y ago
Yet another cool feature lost to the fact that the YouTube "community" is a toxic swamp.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  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.
coliveira 6y ago
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.
vermilingua 6y ago
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.
darepublic 6y ago
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
_nalply 6y ago
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.
rurban 6y ago
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.
sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
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.

355 points by zhamisen 6y ago

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

girvo 6y ago
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.
crazygringo 6y ago
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.
julianlam 6y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  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.
  - jsheard 6y ago
    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.
    - packetlost 6y ago
      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?
      - coliveira 6y ago
        Yes, that would require them to actually talk to customers. This is anathema to their way of operating.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        I don't know why you're assuming they didn't do this.
      - richardbrevig 6y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YL0xoSmyZI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8 Edit: added Steve Krug video.
blueboo 6y ago
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.

deadalus 6y ago

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glenstein 6y ago
The federation of peertube instances, which I feel will eventually be the most critical alternative of all: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
- dreen 6y ago
  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?
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    I think you can torrent the video and they should then also be served from your machine.
    - glenstein 6y ago
      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#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-run-peertube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...
      - RealStickman_ 6y ago
        I wasn't aware of the WebRTC requirement. Thanks
6y ago

toohotatopic 6y ago

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.

aabhay 6y ago
Came here to say this
Dylan16807 6y ago
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.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  Are you suggesting that your anecdote is sufficient to meaningfully change YouTube's strategy around speech-to-text?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Change? No. Show that the system is not up to snuff? Yes.
SllX 6y ago
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.

jxramos 6y ago

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.

twirlock 6y ago

>fuck you, deaf people t. parody of an evil corporation

sriku 6y ago

Rather ironic that Google is having a problem with spam.

082349872349872 6y ago

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

throwawaysea 6y ago

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.

ghego1 6y ago
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.

totetsu 6y ago

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

easton 6y ago
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.
- FranOntanaya 6y ago
  You can enable the YT integration if you are the owner of the channel. https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-linking-youtube-and-amara-accounts https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-l...

verroq 6y ago

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.

gjvnq 6y ago
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.

darthoctopus 6y ago

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.

scoopertrooper 6y ago
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.
dathinab 6y ago
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).
nindalf 6y ago
> 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?
- 6y ago

dirtyid 6y ago

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.

pacamara619 6y ago

> 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.

metiscus 6y ago
And much like Google 411 they are probably killing it now that their model has reached a saddle point with spam removal costs.

birdyrooster 6y ago

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.

zzo38computer 6y ago
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.)
ipsum2 6y ago
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.

llacb47 6y ago

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

notRobot 6y ago
"Community Contributions" is the name of the feature, but the title could be phrased better
pwinnski 6y ago
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."
- llacb47 6y ago
  https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en 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.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    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.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Ah, okay, thanks for explaining!
- frei 6y ago
  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.

uluyol 6y ago

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.

MattGaiser 6y ago
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.
- dathinab 6y ago
  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.
acituan 6y ago
> 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.
- 6y ago

liability 6y ago

Google, the company that runs gmail, can't filters a little spam? That's their excuse for removing accessibility features? What utter shitheads.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Gmail doesn’t filter spam all that reliably either.
- owl57 6y ago
  In my experience, it's almost as reliable as a powered off computer, both at filtering spam and at delivering legitimate mail.

ganfortran 6y ago

> 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.

maple3142 6y ago

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-captions-from-youtube https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove-community-c... But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube's decision.

cyberpsybin 6y ago

RIP Kizuna AI community subbed videos

jlengrand 6y ago

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.

1f60c 6y ago
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.
- jlengrand 6y ago
  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.
- qtplatypus 6y ago
  YouTube runs at a loss. If it was spun off from google it would not be viable.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    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)
    - jlengrand 6y ago
      There are some sources. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_google_runs_youtube_at_a_loss/ 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

niffydroid 6y ago

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.

MandieD 6y ago

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.

detaro 6y ago
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...
- jacobush 6y ago
  Same for random English to Swedish translations.
  - piva00 6y ago
    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.
- polytely 6y ago
  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)
  - wongarsu 6y ago

qwerty456127 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

j45 6y ago

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.

znpy 6y ago

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

shadowgovt 6y ago

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

caymanjim 6y ago
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.

coliveira 6y ago

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.

vermilingua 6y ago

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.

darepublic 6y ago

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

_nalply 6y ago

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.

rurban 6y ago

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.

sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago

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.