Let'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, a

Let'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.