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YouTube is shutting down crowdsourced captions
- gundmc 6y agoPreviously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004573
- sneakernets 6y agoIn a just world, this would be illegal. On the bright side, dozens of browser extensions and scripts will have to be created to solve yet another needless problem created by Google.
- bottled_poe 6y agoIt’s not great, but that’s what happens when a service is driven by profits. This capability seems better suited to an organisation like Wikimedia
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoYoutube turns a profit? Does it? Why won't anyone answer?
- kube-system 6y agoThe person you are responding to did not claim they made a profit, but instead, that they are motivated by it.
- cwhiz 6y agoIt’s community driven, AKA unpaid volunteers. How is this hurting the YouTube bottom line?
- scott31 6y agoNo, in a just world this would be legal.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI've seen neither spam nor abuse in captions, but I have seen plenty of lousy machine captions. (I am hearing, but like clean english captions because one can easily play at 2x or beyond.)
- missedthecue 6y agoI have seen plenty of profane machine captions, but never any profane abuse in crowdsourced ones.
- jxramos 6y agoyep, seen some machine generated profanity before, it's always humorous. That bot has a filthy mouth!
- gwern 6y agoOn the other hand, I've seen some shockingly good machine captions, where I'm fairly sure they were machine because they were just uploaded or I noticed technical terms being transcribed phonetically, but they nevertheless manage to transcribe better than I can understand it. My theory is that they prioritize the full-power RNN transcriptions for only some new videos, and haven't gone back over the full historical YT corpus.
- ShockedUnicorn 6y agoI wish they'd care more about people with foreign accents. I still find any type of google voice recognition unusable, unless I lay on a really bad fake texan accent.
- jk700 6y agoSome people and orgs upload videos with subtitles, especially those targeting international viewers.
- gwern 6y agoI am well aware of that, but when the video comes with no slides and not even a summary, you can guess that they were not paying hundreds of dollars to have it professionally transcribed, and you can also guess that humans were not involved anywhere in the process (either to generate or review it) when they, say, phonetically transcribe fairly common technical jargon which is written prominently on the slide which has been fullscreened for the past minute in the video. (Is it really so hard to believe that the usual neural network progress curve has happened for speech transcription and that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed across videos?)
- tehwebguy 6y agoYouTube is not getting rid of it's hit/miss auto-generated captions. Here's an instance from this year where the auto-generator thought people were saying slurs, but they weren't: https://twitter.com/thetomska/status/1222197520891334656 https://twitter.com/thetomska/status/1222197520891334656
- bthrkekenene 6y agoI mean in that example the language is kind of okay. With the new Supreme Court nomination gay marriage and abortion are on their way to being banned again which is a relief.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago> the auto-generator thought people were saying slurs, but they weren't I'm sympathetic towards YouTube on this particular issue. I clearly remember that there was an early time when a lot of slurs were filtered from YouTube's auto-generator output to prevent such incidents, and then there were some furious complaints about how YouTube censors words in the caption. For example, see [0], and note how the comments are overwhelmingly negative, "Is YouTube becoming a kindergarten now?", "Haven't you got the latest dictionary of Newspeak?", "The age of snowflakes", yet no one realized the serious technical problem of incorrectly identifying words as slur. And now many word filters on auto-generator output have been lifted as the system became more reliable, then we get some furious complaints about how YouTube incorrectly identifies words as slurs. I think there has been a similar accusation that claims Google removes negative keywords for certain politicians from its search recommendations. But a quick test could confirm that it was true even for convicted criminals. Same reason - incorrectly recommending negative keywords about living persons would be a serious incident. [0] Youtube are Censoring the word BULLSHIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoWhat's the point in the system censoring these words in the subtitles, if the words are uncensored in the source audio?
- cwhiz 6y ago>it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse. > because many of you rely on community captions, YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days. What in the world is their motivation here?? This is the kind of thing a company wouldn’t do if they were worried, at all, about competition.
- yorwba 6y agoThey're not worried about competition in the video captioning market because they're not a video captioning company. They're probably losing money on the feature and are happy to offload the work to someone else.
- cwhiz 6y agoLosing money on the unpaid volunteer community that creates the captions??? Wat
- derefr 6y ago> they're not a video captioning company I mean, Google kind of are a video captioning company. Google Video was created with the goal of letting you search videos by indexing the automatic textual transcriptions of their audio content. YouTube still performs that role for Google Search; that's why Google's automatic transcription is as good as it is already.
- hadlock 6y agoMonitoring crowd-sourced captions on political videos and monitoring for abused/slanting the wording sounds like a Hard Problem, in a political minefield of language nuance.
- cwhiz 6y agoThe owner of the video had to approve the captions. And that is still going to be a requirement because captions still exist.
- notRobot 6y agoAs someone with a hearing disability, crowdsourced captions are a godsend for me, and I have never once seen spam or abuse in them. Most videos I watch are on niche and technical topics and the auto generated captions do a remarkably poor job, so I will miss this feature very much. RIP.
- crazygringo 6y ago> and I have never once seen spam or abuse in them. That's because the spam is a problem the content creator has to deal with. According to the article, captions need to be approved by the creator before the public sees them, so you'd never know.
- jph00 6y agoI'm a content creator (fast.ai), and have dozens of multi-hour long videos with community-provided translations and transcriptions. I have never seen any spam or abuse of any form. Removal of this feature is going to impact our international students very badly. Access to technical education was already hard enough - now it'll require English fluency too.
- verroq 6y agoThe spam and abuse happens on very large channels where incentives change quite a lot. E.g. pewdiepie had to disable community contributions because of people sneaking in advertising or spam in the middle of legitimate looking subtitles.
- kelnos 6y agoI guess it also depends on your audience. It's no surprise to me that someone like pewdiepie attracts the sort of people who would do that.
- patmorgan23 6y agoThe solution is to let individual creators turn the feature on and off, which they could already do, not nuke it for the whole site.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoWhat's incredibly insane here, is that "low usage" is the excuse being used to terminate an accessibility feature. Accessibility features will always be low usage, but it's still important to provide them. This is kinda like a restaurant removing their handicapped ramp because it's "not used often". Of course, that'd be illegal.
- jxramos 6y agoYah, this is really poor. I know they have the auto-generated form, but it's far from 100% and a lot of words have a lot of domain specific nuance that it takes a person in that field to disambiguate. They should think twice about bringing this one back. There may be some extra burden on their end too with violation/sabotage contributions showing up to contend with as well.
- roywashere 6y agoMy favorite youtube channel is a Dutch guy who bought an old Russian tank and is getting it in working condition. He talks Dutch, with an accent, from his loud workshop, and uses all the right vocabulary for the things he is working on. This means, he is using a lot more than the most common 300 or so words. There is no way automated captions can be anywhere near OK for that. He currently has a community of volunteers supplying captions and has as a result an audience of Russians and other eastern europeans, who partly used to drive or work on these tanks, watching his channel. This is now made impossible thanks to google.
- alickz 6y agoSounds interesting, do you have a link to their channel?
- asymptotically2 6y agoSounds like MasterMilo! https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82 https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82
- Nightshaxx 6y agoGoogle is basically the grim reaper of products....
- Aerroon 6y agoI don't really understand this. This seemed like a great feature. This is like when YouTube got rid of the text boxes that could be added to videos.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThat time was a mixed blessing. They took away the ability to cheaply correct information on video after upload, but they also killed a lot of annoying spam.
- jk700 6y agoMaybe in both cases they did some A/B testing and found out ads were more effective without either feature. Like isn't it obvious that text boxes interfere with ads, take some attention away from them. Not as obvious with subtitles, but I can see how pushing people to watch something else without subtitles rather than letting them stay on videos and read subtitles is better for ads designed for being viewed in watching context, not reading context.
- derefr 6y agoI finally figured out what got Google scared enough to get rid of video annotations, when I realized that around the same time they also disabled the ability to make embedded YouTube videos full-screen. Because, if a website can embed a YouTube video of a Windows desktop; and either use Javascript to make it fullscreen, or convince you to make the video fullscreen and then "animate" the video closing itself to give you the illusion that you're no longer in the video; and then use annotations to turn the Windows desktop video you're now staring at into an image-map, such that the user will click on the video, thinking they're closing a window on this "desktop"... then you can get all sorts of bad things to happen. Remember: many websites (e.g. blog hosts, forums, commenting systems) that don't support Javascript per se, still support automatic YouTube video embedding by posting a YouTube video URL.
- purple-again 6y agoI’m fascinated but don’t understand how they could be a thing in reality. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever seen or known has a pretty unique desktop cluttered with installed apps and files and usually with a custom background. How could the attackers video simulation of a windows desktop fool the user into thinking they are still on their own computer?
- mekoka 6y agoThe boldness of this decision is a sure sign that YouTube feels quite comfortable in its quasi monopoly.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI also don't think captions are used widely enough to make or break a video site.
- intricatedetail 6y agoThis is just a big fat middle finger at disabled people.
- greggman3 6y agoExcept it's not. they aren't getting rid of captions and they are offering support > YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions, YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days." That arguably points out 2 things. (1) they aren't abandoning disabled people and (2) they're probably not lying about the feature not being used since if it was being used this offer would cost $$$$$$$$$ It sounds like nothing really changed. You can still contribute subtitles to a channel, one of the few that actually uses them, and the channel creator can still attach them to videos. All that changed is the interface to edit is no longer in youtube. Choose any of 1000s other ways, send the creator your subtitles, creator can attach them to video.
- m4rtink 6y agoThe support is time limited & it still prevents people from the community willing to help from doing so.
- greggman3 6y agoIt does no such thing. People can help all they want. They just don't do it in an interface that Google provides. Instead they edit subtitles and send them to the channel's owner. The owner applies them, in the youtube interface, to their video. Given the effort of making captions is actually the work of writing the captions themselves the effort went from several hours of work to the same several hours of work +1 minute. Literally nothing of importance changed. And that +1 minute assumes Youtube's UX was best in class because of it wasn't then moving to a better UX could save more time. The level of animosity toward anything Google does is absurd. If there was a captioning service making money and Google added captions they'd get shade for ruining a market. Now they are removing an arguably rarely used UI but still leaving the feature (captions) completely available. There's literally no harm. The people actually motivated to write captions will barely notice the change. They'll still write them. All they have to do is send them to the channel creator. If the channel creator doesn't want them nothing has changed. They had to approve them before, they have to approve them now except click 1-2 buttons to upload them. Sheesh
- crazygringo 6y agoCan't an external tool take this over? If the article is accurate -- that crowdsources translations always had to be approved by the creator anyways -- then I don't see why third-party sites for this won't pop up, which any channel can direct its users to. > YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. I mean, while the feature was cool, it honestly makes sense to me that it was too niche for YouTube to focus resources on maintaining. (And a lot of people drastically underestimate the constant attention spam prevention requires -- it's horrible, really.) Seriously -- this seems like an awesome opportunity for someone (anyone) to create a superior tool for this, no? A separate community with quality control tools, reputations, discussion boards... And then the creator just easily imports a finished crowdsourced sets of captions/subtitles to their video. Honestly this feels like an ideal "Show HN" project. Not only that, it could grow to become a community hub for crowdsources captioning/subtitling for videos across all platforms, and even bootstrap itself into becoming a major video hosting platform in its own right. Maybe I'm just a glass-half-full guy here, but I see this as a real opportunity. And I have to assume a third party site for this will ultimately do a better job than Google's tool enabled anyways.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoYup, the article even has Google recommending multiple services and paying for people's subscription to an external service for 6 months.
- Fellshard 6y ago"Some people will abuse it, therefore no-one should have it" is a strongly growing mentality in these days, and woe betide us if we keep pursuing it deeper without proper consideration for each case.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe problem is that nice things require guards. Unless the nice thing is profitable, it cannot exist as such things require that guards be paid for.
- thombat 6y agoBut seemingly it already has guards: apparently the captions have to be approved by the video uploader before being displayed to viewers.
- missedthecue 6y agoIf you look at very popular YouTubers, they will have captions translated in 20 languages or more. I'm not sure uploader approval is doing much in that case.
- thombat 6y agoI wildly guess that you may find long-standing relationships between those popular creators and the caption writers, such that they've built some measure of trust. Captions contributed by a new author might get vetted more closely, e.g. at least run through an online translator to see whether it's plainly wrong / torrent of insults / etc.
- rrmm 6y agoI think the real reason is more that detecting and handling abuse would require personnel. This is the one area that makes google and youtube really successful: they've managed to offer services with an absolute minimum (or outright absence of (human) customer service). This cuts out a lot of overhead. It also lets them avoid a lot of difficult decisions wrt policing speech which is something youtube has established a long history of being awful at.
- drhodes 6y agoThis task would be good for captcha fodder.
- aaresto 6y agoThis is plain wrong. Other comments have already given many arguments against this decision, but here is another one: language learners. I've used Youtube to learn German and Japanese. Those subtitles help me figure out what native speakers are saying, specially for videos which are not "clear" enough for the auto-generated subtitles to be good.
- pastaking 6y agoI've worked with the accessibility team at YouTube. That team has brilliant engineers who are themselves blind or deaf, so they really do understand their customers, even if that community is relatively small. If this a grassroots decision from that team, I'm sure they have thought long and hard about it, and I respect that decision. I still believe Alphabet is a company that truly wants to make the world a better place -- I hope they're living by their principles, and not letting the profits (of which they have plenty) get in way.
- niutech 6y agoSo what was the rationale for this decision?
- foxhop 6y agoIts not just the deaf, captions are useful for learning disabilities and listen comprehension difficulties.
- orthecreedence 6y agoYeah, or if I don't have my headphones and I want to watch a video without annoying everyone around me. I have exceptional hearing and have no learning disabilities and I use captions in videos all the time.
- aaron695 6y agoThe ability to search on the internal content of videos I would have considered fking important. Who cares if no-one uses it, the robots should be using it. It's somewhat amazing Google and YouTube don't do it. So I'm not sure what the real reason is here? I could see spammers flooding shitty videos no one watches with fake captions, or popular videos with obscure languages and fake captions and it destroying their search. But currently it doesn't seem to matter anyway.
- sakex 6y agoIf only their machine learning speech to text system was good, that would be alright. But it's extremely inaccurate.
- aiaf 6y agoWhat is "low usage" by Google's standard? A million users? 10 million users? What may look like a blip on Google's radar possibly eclipses a successful startup's entire profit-generating user base.
- impalallama 6y agoif google managed my apartment they'd cut out sections of the floor due to low usage because i didn't actively step on them
- gpmcadam 6y agoHow many fundamental features and product will Google continue to pull before people stop relying on them?
- wazoox 6y agoThe evils of monopoly...
- social_quotient 6y agoDoes this mean it gets added to the graveyard? Or no, because it was just a feature? https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- Scapeghost 6y agoI don't know why Apple hasn't positioned video podcasts as an alternative to YouTube. They already exist, and the subscriber mechanism is already better than YouTube (view offline, choose when/what to download), just needs some work for comments, ratings, annotations etc.
- microcolonel 6y agoIt's amazing how committed YouTube is to destroying everything that makes their platform worthwhile, and turning it into a TV channel where You can just go ahead and join a major media corporation for access to the Tube.
- greggman3 6y agoLet's imagine VLC had a caption editor. Let's imagine VLC found it required lots of maintenance, it's got to support every language on the planet in every OS, and it was just turning out to be a drag on dev. They've got limited resources and they checked their metrics and found only 0.001% of people were using it. They see that it's still fully possible to make your own captions using tons of other software or even by hand using text files in various standard format and VLC reads those formats just fine. If I ran VLC I'd get rid of it. Google is doing no different here. They are not getting rid of captions. They are not getting rid of user captions. They are only getting rid of their onsite caption editor. You can still create captions a thousand other ways. You can still give them to the author of the video and they can upload them into youtube in supported formats and apply them to the video. Want to community edit a captions? Google docs or Google sheets would be two fine places to that. So might github. There's no need for a UI on Youtube for this.
- LockAndLol 6y agoSo then there can be a website or browser extension built to create subtitles. We aren't dependent on YouTube to do everything for us. Especially if the sub's are stored and shared, it will enable them to be used on mirror videos in case YouTube takes something down. I actually think this a good thing. Maybe the community will actually we that dependence on proprietary systems isn't a good thing.