6 ms·

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

by 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.

by pen2l 6y ago

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.