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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 ha

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?
- vosper 6y ago
  > Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident? Apart from the last statement "Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether." the person you replied you was obviously stating their opinions, and not claiming them to be facts. > "an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me" > I don't think this functionality was as little-used Emphasis mine, in both cases. As for the final statement, which is presented as fact, I think it probably is factually accurate that there are more possible options for YouTube than shutting the feature down.
- dntrkv 6y ago
  Amen. How can you make claims like that so confidently? How can you think you know better about something than the team that built it and/or works on it for a living? Imagine someone making these claims about a product you work on. "You should add feature X. Everyone will use it." No, we've tried that beforę and only a tiny subset of users actually used it and it's a massive bitch to maintain.
- int_19h 6y ago
  With subtitles, the obvious solution is to not show them by default, even if the user has the corresponding language selected by default for subtitles in general. The net result would be the same as with this change, except that those of us who rely on community-submitted subtitles would still be able to use them (at the risk of seeing spam occasionally - but it's better than no risk and no feature).
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    I think the point is that google wants to save resources aka. put employees to work on something else.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  > We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views. I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.
kyleee 6y ago
yep, I see this feature being actively used on many of the channels i follow and I see it being appreciated frequently (and asked for when not enabled). This is a good example of inclusiveness in action; many people are able to appreciate content that otherwise may not be compelling to them due to language and ability differences. really sad to see it scrapped
numpad0 6y ago
Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale? I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs context to select but randomly thrown around, probably as a best effort from translators. e.g. [“X had occurred”, “Please do X now”, “Use this to do X”, “Choose which you want for X”, “Do X for this event”] Microsoft used to be great in this regard in 2000s but now feel like I’m back at when gcc was telling me “$DIRNAME am directory entering”
- Y_Y 6y ago
  Even trying to use popular software in a relatively big language like Spanish still inevitably ends up producing lots of untranslated strings (or worse, semi-translated nonsense). I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    I've seen that too and I simply don't understand that. Why do some people half-translate an app? Did they just hardcode some of the copy by accident?
    - iagovar 6y ago
      Because either you have to pay some native a decent money to make a translation or because some strings are embedded in code?
    - ptx 6y ago
      Maybe they fully translated an earlier version of the app but more strings were added in subsequent versions and not translated. When there's no translation available for a string, it falls back to English.
    - 6y ago
Curzel 6y ago
Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless. Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    If you speak multiple languages (which isn't uncommon out of the anglosphere) it becomes very annoying to have YT putting subtitles and translating stuff for you. If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      The automated video title translation "feature" is really fast turning me off YouTube. It's just confusing as hell to see a German title and then realise the video is actually in English.
    - rjsw 6y ago
      English is my first language and I don't want automatic subtitles or translation for stuff in other languages.
  - robin_reala 6y ago
    To be honest, YouTube’s captioning struggles with even British accents.
henrikschroder 6y ago
> I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it. That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand what's important. Because the most important part for getting good subtitles is to get the timing right, to make sure every subtitle is displayed for the minimum time needed, and to make sure you split the dialogue in the right places, so that reading them "flows", so that they match what's being said. And you want to tie them to scene changes, to keyframes, so you don't get weird blinking, and for that you need the ability to step through the video frame by frame and adjust the subtitles. But the YT subtitling tools emphasized the text, and translations of the text. It was easy to suggest changes to a piece of text and get that through the "community" process, but changes to the timing was super-hard to do in their tools, and really hard to get through. You can upload a .srt that you've created in a real subtitling program, but that completely overwrites the existing subtitles, and was impossible to "diff" with what was already there, so that shit gets rejected as a rule, because reviewers don't understand the changes. So the result is that whoever manages to make the first community translation that is accepted, that person's timing is then taken as canon by everyone else, and all other translations are based on those exact timing, never mind if they're good, never mind if they're a good fit for every language, never mind if someone else can do better timings. And that completely sucks the joy out of the process, because you can't really improve existing subtitles, you can only try to change a word here and there.
- MrCzar 6y ago
  Could you recommend a tool that does subtitles and generates a .srt afterwards, from your experience? I have a friend that translates everything from English for his grandmother, so she can watch movies that she does not understand, but he does it by hand in a video editing program. Would love to help him out.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    Aegisub: http://www.aegisub.org/ http://www.aegisub.org/
iagovar 6y ago
There was no option to disable them, and if you are multilingual it's a PITA. Sometimes I became so annoyed that I closed YT. It's not the same effort for my brain to keep up listening to spanish, english, french or portuguese. And I WANT TO KNOW what I'm getting into. If I want subtitles or translations I'll activate it myself, thanks. Sometimes I browse for a topic and I need a native POV out of it, but it became so difficult because YT just treats you like if you were stupid so yo loose time going back and forth. IDK, maybe there was some option to manage it, but it was very well hidden in menus that I couldn't find it.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Toolbar in the bottom right, subtitle icon, disable.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    That's only for subtitles, and somehow if you go into another video, you have to do it again.

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?

vosper 6y ago
> Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident? Apart from the last statement "Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether." the person you replied you was obviously stating their opinions, and not claiming them to be facts. > "an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me" > I don't think this functionality was as little-used Emphasis mine, in both cases. As for the final statement, which is presented as fact, I think it probably is factually accurate that there are more possible options for YouTube than shutting the feature down.
dntrkv 6y ago
Amen. How can you make claims like that so confidently? How can you think you know better about something than the team that built it and/or works on it for a living? Imagine someone making these claims about a product you work on. "You should add feature X. Everyone will use it." No, we've tried that beforę and only a tiny subset of users actually used it and it's a massive bitch to maintain.
int_19h 6y ago
With subtitles, the obvious solution is to not show them by default, even if the user has the corresponding language selected by default for subtitles in general. The net result would be the same as with this change, except that those of us who rely on community-submitted subtitles would still be able to use them (at the risk of seeing spam occasionally - but it's better than no risk and no feature).
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  I think the point is that google wants to save resources aka. put employees to work on something else.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
> We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views. I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.

kyleee 6y ago

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

numpad0 6y ago

Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale? I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs context to select but randomly thrown around, probably as a best effort from translators. e.g. [“X had occurred”, “Please do X now”, “Use this to do X”, “Choose which you want for X”, “Do X for this event”] Microsoft used to be great in this regard in 2000s but now feel like I’m back at when gcc was telling me “$DIRNAME am directory entering”

Y_Y 6y ago
Even trying to use popular software in a relatively big language like Spanish still inevitably ends up producing lots of untranslated strings (or worse, semi-translated nonsense). I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I've seen that too and I simply don't understand that. Why do some people half-translate an app? Did they just hardcode some of the copy by accident?
  - iagovar 6y ago
    Because either you have to pay some native a decent money to make a translation or because some strings are embedded in code?
  - ptx 6y ago
    Maybe they fully translated an earlier version of the app but more strings were added in subsequent versions and not translated. When there's no translation available for a string, it falls back to English.
  - 6y ago

Curzel 6y ago

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

ohgodplsno 6y ago
If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless. Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.
- iagovar 6y ago
  If you speak multiple languages (which isn't uncommon out of the anglosphere) it becomes very annoying to have YT putting subtitles and translating stuff for you. If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    The automated video title translation "feature" is really fast turning me off YouTube. It's just confusing as hell to see a German title and then realise the video is actually in English.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    English is my first language and I don't want automatic subtitles or translation for stuff in other languages.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  To be honest, YouTube’s captioning struggles with even British accents.

henrikschroder 6y ago

> I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it. That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand what's important. Because the most important part for getting good subtitles is to get the timing right, to make sure every subtitle is displayed for the minimum time needed, and to make sure you split the dialogue in the right places, so that reading them "flows", so that they match what's being said. And you want to tie them to scene changes, to keyframes, so you don't get weird blinking, and for that you need the ability to step through the video frame by frame and adjust the subtitles. But the YT subtitling tools emphasized the text, and translations of the text. It was easy to suggest changes to a piece of text and get that through the "community" process, but changes to the timing was super-hard to do in their tools, and really hard to get through. You can upload a .srt that you've created in a real subtitling program, but that completely overwrites the existing subtitles, and was impossible to "diff" with what was already there, so that shit gets rejected as a rule, because reviewers don't understand the changes. So the result is that whoever manages to make the first community translation that is accepted, that person's timing is then taken as canon by everyone else, and all other translations are based on those exact timing, never mind if they're good, never mind if they're a good fit for every language, never mind if someone else can do better timings. And that completely sucks the joy out of the process, because you can't really improve existing subtitles, you can only try to change a word here and there.

MrCzar 6y ago
Could you recommend a tool that does subtitles and generates a .srt afterwards, from your experience? I have a friend that translates everything from English for his grandmother, so she can watch movies that she does not understand, but he does it by hand in a video editing program. Would love to help him out.
- square_usual 6y ago
  Aegisub: http://www.aegisub.org/ http://www.aegisub.org/

iagovar 6y ago

There was no option to disable them, and if you are multilingual it's a PITA. Sometimes I became so annoyed that I closed YT. It's not the same effort for my brain to keep up listening to spanish, english, french or portuguese. And I WANT TO KNOW what I'm getting into. If I want subtitles or translations I'll activate it myself, thanks. Sometimes I browse for a topic and I need a native POV out of it, but it became so difficult because YT just treats you like if you were stupid so yo loose time going back and forth. IDK, maybe there was some option to manage it, but it was very well hidden in menus that I couldn't find it.

freeone3000 6y ago
Toolbar in the bottom right, subtitle icon, disable.
- iagovar 6y ago
  That's only for subtitles, and somehow if you go into another video, you have to do it again.