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I 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 ago
That 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 ago
  Maybe 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I’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?
    - derefr 6y ago
      Such tricks are aimed at the same sort of people who are the target for the badly-spelled-and-grammaticized text in 419 scam emails. Such people don’t tend to have a very good sense of the “formal etiquette of computer software vendors”, so to speak—they don’t know to expect that a system will be guaranteed to follow certain unchanging stylistic conventions. To such users, an OS desktop is an unpredictable thing. Their (live) wallpaper and (dynamic) lock-screen background change out from under them at random. Their theme changes between Light and Dark (and they haven’t yet noticed the concordance with the time of day.) The Google Doodle changes without a seeming pattern (and they’ve never clicked on it to find out why.) Every once in a while, an app updates and looks entirely different after a restart. New application shortcuts appear seemingly at random on their desktop. Whenever their nephew “fixes” their computer, most of those disappear, and many other features get changed as well. Was it something the nephew did? Or were those just temporary, and disappear if you restart the computer? Or were they viruses? Why would such a user even be surprised if, one day, the computer decided to change everything about their desktop out from under them while they were in the middle of watching a video? Par for the course. Computers are unpredictable. ————— But also, it’s pretty easy to make the “desktop” part of the desktop irrelevant. The goal here is to re-invoke the concept that the user is looking at their OS chrome (i.e. “windowed mode”, rather than “fullscreen mode”); not that they’re looking at their desktop specifically. So, in the video, just display a maximized Chrome window showing YouTube navigated to the innocuous “bait” video that was previously playing up to that point, as if the video had been first navigated to and then de-fullscreened. And then, show the pop-up window on top of that maximized Chrome window. The only thing the video’s author needs to get right, at that point, are 1. Chrome’s window decorations, and 2. the taskbar. (It doesn’t matter if the user isn’t using Chrome; even I, as a power-user, wouldn’t find it strange to find that something I had done had managed to install Chrome and force it to open a URL. Happens on Windows with things accidentally opening in Edge all the time. And lots of programs have dark-pattern installers that try to install Chrome for you; especially those of other Google products, e.g. Google Earth, Google Drive, etc.)
- sellyme 6y ago
  I've noticed that the content creators I watch who used to use annotations for corrections still have roughly the same number of corrections in their video, but they're being done in the edit rather than post-upload. I've got no hard evidence of this, but I feel like the removal of that feature got rid of a lot of the annoying spam, and the people who were using it correctly just started paying more attention to their videos before they uploaded them. Obviously some will still get missed, but I think the overall accuracy of the actual videos has increased substantially.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

That 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 ago
Maybe 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I’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?
  - derefr 6y ago
    Such tricks are aimed at the same sort of people who are the target for the badly-spelled-and-grammaticized text in 419 scam emails. Such people don’t tend to have a very good sense of the “formal etiquette of computer software vendors”, so to speak—they don’t know to expect that a system will be guaranteed to follow certain unchanging stylistic conventions. To such users, an OS desktop is an unpredictable thing. Their (live) wallpaper and (dynamic) lock-screen background change out from under them at random. Their theme changes between Light and Dark (and they haven’t yet noticed the concordance with the time of day.) The Google Doodle changes without a seeming pattern (and they’ve never clicked on it to find out why.) Every once in a while, an app updates and looks entirely different after a restart. New application shortcuts appear seemingly at random on their desktop. Whenever their nephew “fixes” their computer, most of those disappear, and many other features get changed as well. Was it something the nephew did? Or were those just temporary, and disappear if you restart the computer? Or were they viruses? Why would such a user even be surprised if, one day, the computer decided to change everything about their desktop out from under them while they were in the middle of watching a video? Par for the course. Computers are unpredictable. ————— But also, it’s pretty easy to make the “desktop” part of the desktop irrelevant. The goal here is to re-invoke the concept that the user is looking at their OS chrome (i.e. “windowed mode”, rather than “fullscreen mode”); not that they’re looking at their desktop specifically. So, in the video, just display a maximized Chrome window showing YouTube navigated to the innocuous “bait” video that was previously playing up to that point, as if the video had been first navigated to and then de-fullscreened. And then, show the pop-up window on top of that maximized Chrome window. The only thing the video’s author needs to get right, at that point, are 1. Chrome’s window decorations, and 2. the taskbar. (It doesn’t matter if the user isn’t using Chrome; even I, as a power-user, wouldn’t find it strange to find that something I had done had managed to install Chrome and force it to open a URL. Happens on Windows with things accidentally opening in Edge all the time. And lots of programs have dark-pattern installers that try to install Chrome for you; especially those of other Google products, e.g. Google Earth, Google Drive, etc.)
sellyme 6y ago
I've noticed that the content creators I watch who used to use annotations for corrections still have roughly the same number of corrections in their video, but they're being done in the edit rather than post-upload. I've got no hard evidence of this, but I feel like the removal of that feature got rid of a lot of the annoying spam, and the people who were using it correctly just started paying more attention to their videos before they uploaded them. Obviously some will still get missed, but I think the overall accuracy of the actual videos has increased substantially.