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Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

• RattlesnakeJake 4y ago
  1) Dialogue is mixed too quietly these days 2) Thin LCD TVs have bad speakers, and I haven’t gotten around to researching soundboard yet 3) My kids talk through everything and I can’t hear over them
• malshe 4y ago
  Without paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-all-these-20-somethings-have-closed-captions-turned-on-11663386473?st=myael30fb1sfl77&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-all-these-20-somethings-...
• pkrotich 4y ago
  I can relate so much… I don’t have any hearing loss and I’m in my mid 40s, but I no longer watch anything I truly need to pay attention to without captions or subtitles. In fact, I like foreign films because picture and caption is enough for my brain - it’s like I have 2 brain channels and voice is simply a distraction / noise. I think partly it’s because English is not my native language so caption in the early days helped. I also grew up with radio (no electricity / TV) - so I mostly listened and made up my own pictures. That said, I don’t completely tune out the voice now - it’s useful for tone and inflections but I depend on captions to get the the compete picture.
  • sweetheart 4y ago
    Even though English is my native language I’ll always opt for subtitles for any movie or show I’m watching. It just helps to not miss anything in the story or scene, and I never even notice them. Reading them becomes completely subconscious.
    • pkrotich 4y ago
      You’re right - perhaps it’s normal for people who can read and listen to music at the same time.
• quantified 4y ago
  From the article: Because it's harder for them to concentrate. Plays to some stereotypes at least.
  • Twirrim 4y ago
    This article feels like the next generation of "Millennials are ruining...." much like "Gen Y is ruining..." etc. articles that came before those.
    • zach_garwood 4y ago
      Millennials are Gen Y. Gen Z are the ones just now becoming adults. I think you meant Gen X. And yes, Boomers just love to complain about every subsequent generation. I, for one, will not miss them when they're gone.
      • Twirrim 4y ago
        It's not just boomers complaining, if you look at the ages of the journalists behind the articles, you'll generally find it's younger journalists, approaching 30s, maybe 40s, effectively taking the crap they got and passing it down the line. In this article's case, a quick google search shows the journalist is in their mid 20s.
• Twirrim 4y ago
  We started putting captions on when our first kid was born, so we could still watch TV but have the volume down nice and low and not disturb her sleep. It made a radical difference. We now tend to just have them on all the time. It's really mostly more modern movies and TV that we get value from it on, the audio mix is becoming such a mess with dialogue sinking in to the mix, that it's taking so much more effort to watch & listen. Put something on from 20ish years ago and the mix is totally different. That's despite having a sound system with a multiple speakers.
  • julianlam 4y ago
    One wonders what the judging criteria are for sound mixing at the Academy Awards, since it certainly seems like "legible speech" isn't one of them.
    • nick__m 4y ago
      Most production are not made with the passable quality of reproduction that a sound bar provides in mind. Mix are made for a THX compliant setup where the center speaker is responsible for over 50% of the dialog delivery. If you skimp on the center speaker quality and placement, the dialog mix gets muddy quite quickly.
      • toast0 4y ago
        I go to the local movie house a fair bit, and while it may not be THX certified or compliant, it's certainly not too bad. Some movies include speech that's easy to understand and others are kind of hard to hear. Certainly, modern very thin TVs have a very uphill battle to fight, but a good center doesn't fix everything.
      • Jolter 4y ago
        Not to mention that they are mixed for reference volume. If people weren’t concerned about neighbors, sleeping babies or protecting their hearing, I’m sure they would just crank it up and not miss any dialog. Of course, that’s just not possible (or enjoyable on most equipment).
• legrande 4y ago
  I religiously have CCs turned on for everything I watch. Open Subtitles[0] is my daily staple. I sometimes miss little phrases/words in a movie, and if I miss them, the whole plot could be ruined for me and I wouldn't know what was going on. I pay attention to every word. [0] https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs
• PrivateButts 4y ago
  We often have to turn them on because media mastered for different sound systems tend to get mixed up on our basic tv setup. Also if we're watching something with loud ads (Hulu), we'd rather have the show be quiet and have CC on then have to constantly adjust the volume.
• jschveibinz 4y ago
  Two reasons from my perspective, other than my ears are getting older: 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors. 2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.
  • als0 4y ago
    > 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors. I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.
    • dizhn 4y ago
      Some TVs and receivers have a night mode that does what you want. It's basically a compressor that cuts off the high peaks. I've always been told that the ads are not really louder, that's another compression technique at work. There's no dynamic range and everything is at the top of the volume range. ( I think it amounts to the same thing )
    • bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
      Apple TV has a "reduce loud sounds" setting that basically does this
  • acron0 4y ago
    > 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors. I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!
• tomatotomato37 4y ago
  Not mentioned: The increase in poor audio mixing that sounds like it was done by a monkey in addition to the prevalence of devices with speakers crammed in odd directions inside of enclosures that are in no way, shape, or form big enough to contain them. If there was one advantage of the days of big tube TVs it was you had plenty of space to also fit big speakers in too
  • ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    Even on my nice 2.1 setup on my PC, I always put captions on. It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand. It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or ask them to repeat before the sentence makes any sense to me. Perhaps us, and the TV actors, just don't enunciate like we used to?
    • a_e_k 4y ago
      I think mishearing a word causes an effect that feels something like a mental mispredict leading to a pipeline flush. There's definitely a delay to refill that pipeline.
      • ktkoffroth 4y ago
        This is the best way I've ever heard it described
  • analog31 4y ago
    In addition, I've read that young people are going deaf due to ear buds.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Tbf, that's been the case for a hundred years since headphones were invented. I doubt it's changed much.
• unity1001 4y ago
  Also probably because reading something is much faster than listening it. It takes just a second to visually read a sentence that is on the screen, instead of waiting for 2-3 seconds for the actor to actually say it out loud. Probably because we humans recognize words and word groups instead of letters (as how that Oxford study a few years back found out), and that's much faster.
  • jostylr 4y ago
    I'd be curious to know how many speed up the videos versus cc it. I know I prefer most videos at faster speeds unless there is a lot of music in it. But cc'ing it with faster speeds is difficult. As a side note, I think the Rings of Power would be way more enjoyable if I could just 2x it. Kind of hoping someone here will say "You can do that, just ..."
    • jqgatsby 4y ago
      I think there will be a trend of content being made specifically with a faster playback speed in mind. I watch my 10 year old son who habitually watches videos at 2x and I can't believe that its not the same for many other kids.
• mutt2016 4y ago
  I used CC for the same reason as many. Speech audio is of poor quality, back in the old days in my CRT television it wasn't a problem. Speech was clear. Now for whatever reason it's too loud for comfort if I want to hear the words. My tv has speech clarity options but it is marginal at best. I'm using a Roku streambar with a couple of wireless speakers. Still poo audio. And I'm not convinced a system of higher cost and quality would solve it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• extragood 4y ago
  > Captions can also facilitate multitasking I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read. I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation of knowledge in prehistory. Spoken word is inherently ephemeral. As civilizations developed or adopted writing systems, and the population became increasingly literate, text supplanted spoken communication and oral history in many areas. There are many obvious benefits to that change, but I believe that we also inadvertently sacrificed our listening and auditory comprehension skills in the process over many generations. Text messaging/SMS is increasingly preferred to phone calls, with many of the younger generations experiencing high levels of anxiety if they're required to call someone. This is completely anecdotal, but I've also observed several others who are unable to follow verbal navigation instructions - either spoken from another person or even live step by step instructions from a navigation app. They only feel confident if there's a visual representation. I think we've mistakenly classified that behavior as having a "visual learning style", when it is more accurately the result of our species losing its ability to process auditory language.
  • bilekas 4y ago
    This is an interesting take actually.. If we can assume that younger generations spend more time communicating electronically via some form of text messaging, at least the majority so, are you saying that that just becomes the "default" form of communication naturally? Where are older generations would have spend far more time communicating verbally.. That makes some sense to me anyway. Would be super interesting to see some further studies done. And to philosophise the results that could mean.
    • extragood 4y ago
      I was thinking along those lines, yeah. Extrapolating that out, I can imagine a future where writing is the only form of language. It'd make for some interesting dystopian fiction, if nothing else. I'd be interested in some formal studies as well. My thoughts aren't well researched or anything. Just ideas.
• stuckinhell 4y ago
  Because they are on their phone a lot, and reading is faster. So closed captions allow easier multitasking.
• _8j50 4y ago
  Not in that age group but I can't imagine not having cc on. I was hooked when watching anime and foreign movies but even with english movies they only have an upside. You don't have to guess what word they said or how someone's name is spelled. Loud scenes where you can barely hear them is one but also when you have characters that have accents or switch to a different language it helps (you don't get distracted by the sudden need to read cc). You have to get used to it but it only takes a few tries.
  • thatsamonad 4y ago
    I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default. I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
  • Zircom 4y ago
    One downside of having captions on all the time is that forced subtitles when characters are speaking a foreign language in an otherwise native language show are usually burned into the actual video stream instead of being in the same text file that the normal subtitles pull from, so a lot of lazy captions providers will put something like "<Walter speaking Spanish>" in the captions, which will then be displayed over the same space the burned in subtitles are for the entirety of the time they are speaking, meaning I have to rewind, turn off subtitles, rewatch the scene, then re enable the subtitles if I want to actual know what is going on.
  • seniorsassycat 4y ago
    Subtitles can hurt jokes by spoiling the punchline without the actors timing or delivery. I wonder if delaying joke/punchline subtitles till after the spoken line is complete would improve this
    • 4y ago
• adwi 4y ago
  Tangential: I’ve found subtitles to be a very useful tool for learning a language. In order of challenge, I’ll at least watch everything in English with Spanish subtitles, then Spanish SAP with English subtitles, then Spanish SAP with Spanish subtitles, then just in Spanish.
  • russellbeattie 4y ago
    I discovered something amusing about this. When I was living in Spain 20 years ago, my Spanish (ex-) wife and I bought a DVD collection of Friends. At first we'd watch it in English with Spanish captions so my ex could get the subtleties, then as her English improved, we'd watch it with English captions which helped with words she was unfamiliar with. Then we started doing the reverse, Spanish overdub with English captions so I could practice. But when it came time for me to try Spanish overdub with Spanish captions, it turned out that the scripts had obviously been translated by two different companies, and what was said could be wildly different from what was written. Hysterically bad differences - to the point of completely changing the sentiment of something that was said. Mostly it was with insults or expressions, which could have various ways of translating, but sometimes they changed entire plot points, especially when a character's relationship with another was ambiguous. An aunt could be just a friend, or a sister-in-law could be a co-worker. It was so confusing, after a little while I just turned off the captions completely. Since I had seen all the shows at least once, it wasn't a problem. A fun thing to do on Disney Plus is change between the various Spanish regions to see how they overdub characters. I did this for Guardians of the Galaxy and it's fantastic how Rocket would go from being a Mexicano gangster to a Spanish thug.
    • jdofaz 4y ago
      I see that a lot on Netflix, I like to watch with the captions on but not for the foreign stuff with English dubbing. Squid Games is one that comes to mind where I'd have to turn the captions off because the mismatch between the english audio and captions was too distracting for me.
  • hnick 4y ago
    Or Baltimore slang, like when I tried to watch The Wire back in the day. It was actually the show that I first turned on subs for and I usually keep them on now out of habit. I found the thick local accents hard to understand which is rare for me, and I didn't know if words were just slang or I'd misheard. Throw in a bunch of unique names to the mix too (I can rarely remember someone's name anyway after an introduction until I read it) as well as a few mumbley characters. Great show but I needed help.
• pfdietz 4y ago
  Why look at captions when you can look at the transcript?
• knaik94 4y ago
  Another reason that I can think of is that many people are watching content at a increased playback rate. I personally limit that to education content because for things like comedy it can mess with pacing. But I have friends that have used it while watching really long shows. It doesn't have to be much faster but if you think about a 10 hour series, that is approximately an hour saved. I recognize that this seems odd, but I have tried it on some shows and it honestly makes them more enjoyable. It's not universal to every show or to every person.
  • smeej 4y ago
    I watch everything on 1.4x, but I would watch it faster if it wouldn't run into buffering issues and get glitchy. Podcasts are normally 2.2x. I just find I enjoy taking the information in more when I can do it quickly. If my brain has no trouble operating at that speed, I might as well take advantage of the chance to get more new ideas in my head!
  • Viliam1234 4y ago
    Same here. Many movies are nice but slow; watching at 1.5× speed makes it a better experience. But then it becomes difficult to understand some dialogs, so I turn CC on.
  • userbinator 4y ago
    I do that too - 1.5x seems to be the minimum I'll start with, and sometimes I'll go as high as 2.5x. Having subs definitely helps at the upper end of the range. On the other hand, the downside is that when you interact with people in realtime, you constantly feel like they're speaking too slowly, and others have trouble understanding what feels like a normal speed of talking for you.
• procinct 4y ago
  I’m also a big fan of watching with CC (sometimes it can be genuinely hard to pick up what someone says and it can be key dialogue). However anything in the comedy genre is the exception since CC ruin the timing of the jokes.
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    I absolutely get the worry (and reality) of jokes being ruined. In the end I bite the bullet because of the same reason I want CC's on all the time: I just miss or mishear things when I don't, sometimes to the point I don't understand the joke. That said, sometimes subs (from places like OpenSubtitles) are laughable bad in that they don't know the "in-universe" words for a show (comedy or otherwise) and do best-guesses/phonetic spellings of things they aren't sure of which is it's own issue.
• diziet 4y ago
  Closed Captions are more available now through settings, great audio <> text models, exposure of people to foreign language films and shows, etc. The 20-somethings are exposed to it more and adopt to using them. Youtube's closed captions are both a noticeable button and a "c" keyboard shortcut.
  • Sirened 4y ago
    TikTok even has caption on by default!
    • jamiek88 4y ago
      You know what, I never even noticed that! It does. I guess I figured that as the TikTok aesthetic and never even really thought more than that.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  I grew up with Dutch subs and later English subs on the beeb (you could use teletext for that back in the day – maybe you still can?) in my teens. Then I watched stuff without subs for years just fine; I managed to watch Shameless without subs years ago (which was a bit hard at times; stuff didn't commonly come with subs back then). I turned on subs for The Expanse as the belter dialect was difficult to follow at times, and I've used it regularly ever since. It just makes things a tad easier; no more "wait, what did he say? ah well, whatever" At times it also makes things a bit easier to skip ahead when things aren't all that interesting.
• perrygeo 4y ago
  The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption. People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic. People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
  • pedalpete 4y ago
    I agree, but also find it surprising that younger generations are more focused on what they are watching. I'm a background watcher for sure, and this trend with CC suggests to me that the whole "2nd screen" thing isn't playing with the younger generation. Any insights as to why that may be? To give more context, I was always a "background media" person. Even as a kid I'd draw while in front of the TV, I was never a focused participant.
    • kuschku 4y ago
      Because the younger generation is watching Netflix on their phones. There is no second screen phenomenon because there is no second screen.
    • nicolas_t 4y ago
      I use CC even in my native language especially when I background watch. It's easy to work while watching a tv show (only works with relatively boring work) if I know I can quickly glance at the subtitles if I missed anything.
• neonate 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/b25ea https://archive.ph/b25ea
• vba616 4y ago
  If you have audio on, you can't so easily ignore ads. It's intrusive. Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
• esharte 4y ago
  Why don't cinemas have them then? It's because people are listening to shows through terrible audio setups by default
  • xivzgrev 4y ago
    Maybe I need to improve ours! I have zero problem at movies. But I always watch TV with subcaptions. There’s usually some words that I miss
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    This is one (of many to be fair) reasons I quite dislike the theater. Others being "free" food/drinks, my dog, my comfortable couch, pausing, and my bathroom. I've wondered before if they could give people special glasses (a la 3D glasses) that would show the "hidden" subtitles at the bottom. But even that wouldn't get me back in a theater.
  • callalex 4y ago
    Don’t most cinemas have a personal screen with captions available on request?
  • dymk 4y ago
    Personally, I've never had a problem hearing dialog at the movies. The volume is far too cranked up to miss it.
  • Sugimot0 4y ago
    This!! Most speakers/soundbars suck, and if you don't have a center channel in your sound system, voices will wash out with the background noise/music since the speaker (as in person speaking) is usually the focus of the shot and mostly audible in the center channel. There's supposed to be sound engineers on every show/movie to make sure it sounds good but the gap lies between your audio system and the reference systems they use. A good analogy is the infamous Game of Thrones battle that was too dark. They edited that episode on reference grade monitors where you could see what was happening, but the average lower end tv and viewing environment couldn't translate the same black levels and details that the editor's had seen when they worked those scenes (they were also intemtionally edited to look dark and chaotic on the reference grade monitors*, which added to the problem) That being said I still use cc with a lot of content. I think it would be less prevalent though if it were not for the gaping holes in most audio setups.
• Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
  I always have subtitles on in games. Especially since I find it hard to focus on the words being spoken and video game cutscenes are almost always unable to be rewound. During gameplay it's harder to read and play at the same time though, although over the years it's gotten easier. Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time. I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    I had to buy a 3.1 bar just to get a center channel. Basically one of us couldn't make out voices without it, and there were a couple movies/shows where it was just unwatchable. I'm not sure why things like Apple TV can't do a more credible job remixing the audio for 2 speakers.
    • ericcholis 4y ago
      I think the speakers in most TV's these days are a big culprit.
      • hinkley 4y ago
        I bought my TV in part based on reviews for audio quality. And while that’s certainly part of the equation, this has just been getting worse the last few years.
  • lnauta 4y ago
    I have them on for games so I can read the conversation and skip to the next sentence. For open world RPG games that are 50+ hours long it really helps staying engaged, as some quest lines are not that interesting and I like to complete all side quests.
  • 4y ago
• antiterra 4y ago
  The other trend I notice is not caring much at all about video quality. If there’s social interaction, young people I know are happy with a low bitrate 720p streamed over discord in a small window. Maybe this is an artifact of videos on phones?
  • Bakary 4y ago
    This trend is as old as filesharing, probably much older
    • Macha 4y ago
      Yep, the 12-14" CRT was a fixture in basically every kids bedroom in my childhood and a decade later it was flip top portable dvd players with built in screen. Absolutely garbage picture quality even by the standards of the day, pretty popular because it gave them control and could be shared with friends
      • antiterra 4y ago
        I have never seen someone of big-screen means choose to watch a flip top dvd player outside of a portable environment or the kitchen or something. There are people with 4k TVs viewable from their desk who primarily watch movies in a small Discord window because of the social element.
    • antiterra 4y ago
      There have always been people who don’t care, I’m saying that the demographic corresponding with tech enthusiasts who were excited about DTS, THX, 4k, Blu-Ray, or complained about 240p video on YouTube seem to care much less now.
      • Bakary 4y ago
        The market is a bit more streamlined now, so once you check the 4K OLED smart TV surround speaker box there's less to discuss about hardware. With the rise of streaming, the decision is binary: use it or don't. And if you do use it your choice is more limited when it comes to discussing video quality itself. Tech enthusiasts focused on quality will be found discussing encoding methods on private torrenting groups or emerging tech like e-ink. And the "audiophile" crowd is as vibrant as ever.
• captainbland 4y ago
  I started using them for two reasons: at one place we were living, there was a lot of ambient noise which would sometimes periodically drown out the sound which can make you miss key pieces of dialogue. It's also the case that the large amount of dynamic range in many modern shows/films means that for the loud sounds to be at a reasonable volume, some speech gets almost inaudibly quiet so subtitles help with that.
  • lloeki 4y ago
    Seconding that. Also some movies/shows have potent actors yet somehow they have terrible delivery^, but the subs are good. In that case I either lower volume (and mentally shut away voices) or outright turn sound off and use the power of imagination^^. ^ also applies to bad dubbing + original audio not available ^^ seems to be an increasingly rare skill these days
• thanhhaimai 4y ago
  As some one who has CC on all the time if possible, here is the simple reason why I do it: it saves time. - when I play game, I don't need to restart or rewind if I missed a sentence. - when I watch movie, similarly, I can capture way more context without having to ask "what did the character say?" - when I click on a short clip, I can understand without having to turn on and off audio. It's all about convenience and saving time for me.
  • lanstin 4y ago
    Also a lot of times you get plot info from the captions. Like I won’t hear anything but the caption is [ominous foot steps] or [Krish slamming the door]
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Maybe they were watching Tenet and left CC on.
• kyawzazaw 4y ago
  Hard to hear for me. Also non-native English speaker.
• StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  As a gen-x'r I find it incredibly distracting to keep subtitles on, and always turn them off whenever possible.
• CamperBob2 4y ago
  Because filmmakers don't know how to handle dialogue in multichannel mixes anymore.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  31 but yeah, I've had subs on for almost a decade now? Maybe only 6-7 years? For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. I read quickly so subs have never been an issue to me, I can scan and parse the subs and be looking back at the video in no time at all. For foreign content (like Anime) I use dubs + subs (the subs are of the initial English translation before the dubs were done) because it gives 2 passes at any given line. I find it very interesting to see how they change things between the two and it sometimes paints a fuller picture.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. So many video sources coming with only surround mixes, or lazy stereo mixes that were made automatically from surround mixes, while very few homes have a surround system at all, and even fewer have one that's at least decently-calibrated, has been absolute hell for being able to tell WTF anyone's saying in movies. I suspect many VHS releases had better audio for most people's actual system even today, than the blu-ray of the same movie does.
  • Filligree 4y ago
    > For foreign content (like Anime) I use dubs + subs (the subs are of the initial English translation before the dubs were done) because it gives 2 passes at any given line. I find it very interesting to see how they change things between the two and it sometimes paints a fuller picture. Anime is an interesting case, because — remember, a lot of these threads are about poor enunciation and mixing? — anime tends to be really well enunciated, and the characters speak like they're on stage. It's easy to follow along. I keep subs on, because I don't understand literally everything, but usually I don't read them. Surprise surprise, this doesn't reduce my immersion at all.
    • 4y ago
• glandium 4y ago
  Tangentially: Youtube really likes to turn CC on randomly on its own, even when it's explicitly disabled. Both in the mobile app and the website.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ENGNR 4y ago
    This, it’s a minor frustration but everything seems to be going cc by default, which would bump the usage numbers. I wonder if it’s because there’s a measurable engagement increase rather than just user preference? As someone who doesn’t want them I have to keep actively turning them off everywhere
  • XorNot 4y ago
    I was looking for this comment. In the last couple of months every 3rd or so video seems to have CC switched on for no reason.
    • glandium 4y ago
      It's often even worse than that, with CC going back on during and/or after mid-roll ads.
  • NobodyNada 4y ago
    Is it possible that you’re hitting a keyboard shortcut by accident? IIRC YouTube turns on captions if you ever press the “c” key, which I definitely do by accident once in a while.
  • epakai 4y ago
    I have the opposite. Youtube captions never stay on despite my account preferences and being logged in.
• smeej 4y ago
  The article mentions but doesn't get into the "audio description" option too. If you haven't ever tried this, it takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it makes multitasking much easier. I strongly recommend giving it a try. During the gaps in speech, a narrator comes on and describes the most important things happening on the screen. I had a gig for awhile actually writing the descriptions for this content, and it's really interesting work! I love that we're discovering that features invented for "accessibility" are appreciated by many people who would not otherwise have identified an accessibility need. I can't help but wonder if it means people who were only dealing with mild impairments are now receiving assistance they didn't know they would benefit from. How many people do you think can pass a hearing test in a silent room lab setting, but have a hard time in our noisy world?
  • silisili 4y ago
    I watched Super 8, on I think Amazon, when it came out. I thought it was about the weirdest movie I'd ever seen, a narrated in real time action movie. Come to find out, for whatever reason, it had audio description turned on by default. As someone who can see and hear fine, I found it rather odd(before learning what it was). But for a vision impaired person, such a thing must be a game changer.
    • plushpuffin 4y ago
      I had the opposite experience watching a vampire film called 30 Days of Night! For whatever reason my DVD player didn’t show any subtitles, even the translation from the Aramaic spoken by the vampires. So, I got to watch a bunch of undead growl unintelligibly at each other throughout the movie. It actually improved the experience because not knowing what they were saying made it so much creeper!
      • rdlw 4y ago
        Related: Joel Haver - "When a character speaks a different language but doesn't get subtitles" https://youtu.be/xK3IYMRZ4EA https://youtu.be/xK3IYMRZ4EA
  • 4y ago
• zach_garwood 4y ago
  I like having CCs on for movies because the dialog is always so quiet compared to the music and sound effects. I can keep it at a reasonable volume and still catch what the characters are saying. Also, if I'm watching British shows, I like CCs because I'm really bad at accents. Edit: I'm coming up on 40 now, so I guess I'm not the people this article is complaining about.
  • Somatochlora 4y ago
    I don't understand how the people making movies/TV still haven't figured this out. Do they all just have home theaters and never try to watch something on a phone with crappy audio or when somebody is sleeping in the house?
    • boltzmann-brain 4y ago
      Do you think those people actually watch the stuff they make? If they did, half of it would never get released, and the next 49% would be way better than it is right now. An example of this being the case (that movie creators don't watch their stuff) is that most of the Star Trek TNG actors freely admit they've never watched most of their episodes.
• dnndev 4y ago
  I have it on all the time due to the volume range going from soft to insanely loud to soft and it’s annoying… when the kids are sleeping this is also a show stopper
• bsder 4y ago
  Isn't this just because dumbass video sites are making it bloody impossible to scrub the video to a specific time point in order to increase "engagement"? If the audio is recorded on a potato (aka: standard Hollywood audio editing nowadays) and you can't move backward to try again, you need subtitles to not lose context.
• simonw 4y ago
  I recently graduated to the next step beyond closed captions: I've started enabling audio descriptions for TV shows too. It's SO interesting. They are generally really well put together. And they often highlight things that I would have missed - mentioning the name of a character who joins a scene who I don't instantly recognize, for example. Even more fun: audio descriptions of the title sequences for a TV show. Three that I particularly enjoyed were Severance, Moon Night and Star Trek: Picard - in all three cases the titles are rich with visual metaphors relating to the show, which the audio description then carefully spells out for you!
  • zachthewf 4y ago
    I've never heard of this. Is it something offered by all the big streaming services?
    • jes5199 4y ago
      yes
    • Symbiote 4y ago
      It's intended for people with vision problems. My grandma uses it. "John enters the room, looking furious. He's holding some money. Simon stares at David." So at least in Britain, it's available on normal, broadcast TV.
  • bilekas 4y ago
    This is something I might do with a movie I love and could act in, actually I used to do it with DVD's that offered it. But as a 'go to', that's like reading the comments before the article. Edit: Not exactly the same : I was referring to "Directors commentary" audio tracks. Edit 2: I'm a bit worried you need the environment and expressions explained to you...
  • uno123 4y ago
    I find Amazon X-Ray similarily userful. It displays the current actors on screen, their screen names, and the current song playing in the background of any scene. As far as I know, no other streaming service has this feature.
• Eleison23 4y ago
  My Mom and Dad are avid TV watchers, and now my octogenarian father does have significant hearing loss. We've been using subtitles for decades, probably since the 90s when I started to play with the settings on our newly-purchased TV sets. We enjoy it, especially because we watch a lot of British TV, and although we are quite accustomed to many varied accents from around the Empire, subtitling definitely helps with the interesting turns of phrase, the barely-intelligible asides, and comprehension in general. I also love watching Spanish subtitles to learn the language better. However, I do tend to disable them on YouTube, because they distract and detract from the viewing experience when they are completely unnecessary.
• kevinventullo 4y ago
  35 now, but I’ve been using CC for as long as I can remember. Maybe since I was 7 or 8 years old. For me it was always that I could never really make out the dialogue much of the time, and with live tv there was no rewinding so CC gave me a second chance if I missed something.
• JALTU 4y ago
  I sort of doubt there's really a so-called generational gap. I suspect it's just the usual click bait. I'm sorry I don't have the link but there actually was an online lament by professional sound crews for film/TV that I read a few months back. Sound is apparently compromised by the usual suspects: creative egos, competing priorities, actors' failure to enunciate clearly, and failure to appreciate the technical nature of audio recording. In some cases, the director instructs the sound crew to "capture" the performance after the scene is shot. I've never worked on a set before so I'll leave it at that and say that as an older person, I love CC and use it all the time whether I'm other-tasking or not!
  • nuclearnice1 4y ago
    The article cites > In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans, 70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennial respondents (up to age 41) said they watch content with text most of the time. That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents, according to the report commissioned by language-teaching app Preply. Not sure if you want to trust Preply over your clickbait spidey sense. I’ve never heard of them. But FYI.
• ecshafer 4y ago
  I started using captions as a teen because of watching anime, and then I started doing it with normal tv. I am not in my 20s but I think a big part of it is that most tv shows and movies have become absolutely impossible to hear what they are saying. I think speakers on TVs have gotten really bad with the transition to flat screen, and even with a sound system the mixing of audio has gotten really bad. Music and sound effects go over the dialogue too much. Movie theaters its fine, so I am not sure what they are doing differently.
  • lofatdairy 4y ago
    Maybe spatially separating where sound is coming from helps? Or perhaps not having to overlay multiple audio tracks on a single speaker output allows for higher fidelity due to better dynamic range. In any case I think my anime watching has resulted in a slight dislike for CC if only because I find it all too easy to accidentally only read, and actually the action going on. I only realized this when I go back and rewatched some old youtube clips and found myself not remembering the actual animation and physical comedy.
  • lanstin 4y ago
    And the volume levels vary so much. If you don’t want hearing loss or angry housemates you turn it down and then can’t hear the normal dialog. If I am watching very closely I will incessantly fiddle with the volume, but otherwise then captions are nice. I agree tho I miss visual side of the film while reading the captions. But I also tend to watch stuff I really like more than once so I get the body language second run thru.
    • loonster 4y ago
      Buy a sound system. I now have a 3.1 setup and can hear the dialogue. A dedicated center channel makes a huge difference. Its amazing. Many AVRs can also adjust it so the dialogue is louder, but I haven't found a need.
      • desmosxxx 4y ago
        It's definitely better but I still find mixing inconsistent enough that I have to cycle through profiles on my AVR(denon)/system(performa3) to find a mixing that works. Mostly seems to be an issue with stuff in the last couple of decades.
• rvba 4y ago
  Theory: older americans never liked foreign movies since they couldnt keep up with reading subtitles. (Some) Younger ones learned to read better thanks to subtitles in computer games.
• rambojohnson 4y ago
  this is not a generational thing, but more about immersion...
• xena 4y ago
  Why is it so hard to hear dialogue in modern TV shows and movies?
  • topspin 4y ago
    Because they're producing for surround sound systems you can't be bothered to deploy or operate optimally. 5.1, 7.1, etc. The "center" channel, in particular, is where the bulk of dialog is rendered and if your system can't synthesize that channel extremely well on the loud speakers you have then dialog suffers. Also, if you lack a surround sound system -- say you're using a pair of stereo speakers -- all the audio is mixed to these few loud speakers and the spatial segregation that we two-eared beings use to isolate sound is lost. There is no fix for that; the work was produced with the assumption of surround sound and driving all of that audio through a pair of closely spaced flat screen speakers/sound bar/whatever screws everything up spatially and dynamic range wise. The audio is tailored for the minority of people that invest in "home theater" while most people, even those that can afford to, don't care enough about teevee to build such a system. In theory one should expect media to support non-optimal cases, and provision for exactly that exists, but this costs more production money to do correctly and so it gets neglected in various ways. Obviously they don't neglect the demanding consumer with his costly home theater setup because they'll get pilloried, so they half ass the other side.
• mynegation 4y ago
  ESL here. Not so much for TikTok videos but I turn on subtitles when movie dialog is in some English dialect that is different from the standard North American one. I could not figure out 40% of what is happening in “No country for old men”. British period dramas are sometimes hard too.
• INGSOCIALITE 4y ago
  I was a bartender for a long time and I just got so used to having the closed captioning on so I could watch tv that I cannot engage myself in any video media any more without closed captioning on
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  I think that when you spend a lot of time reading, the cognitive load becomes almost free. On the contrary, listening is difficult, especially when people don't talk very well or loud enough, or with foreign accents. Combining reading and listening is a way to simply reduce the cognitive load.
  • lanstin 4y ago
    Pretty sure practice also improves that. Even lip reading is possible with enough practice. And for sure accents understanding improve pretty fast if you bend your mind to it. The danger there for me is if I am trying to get a new accent, I might start copying the accent or word choices a bit and embarrass myself. Humans are amazingly flexible in what we can do without thought, after a bit of practice.
  • cratermoon 4y ago
    Something like this occurred to me. I can watch movies and videos for entertainment and casual attention, but I follow and learn video terribly. I need words. I do OK with presentations and lectures where there's a slide deck. If it's solely talking, I don't keep up well. Captions make it possible for me to engage my better cognitive abilities. What I see happening is that the much-ballyhooed "pivot to video", though more hype than reality, is a thing – I see more stuff as just video, nothing written.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  Not being 20-something, I can't speak for them, but for me: A lot of dialog is mixed way down in relation to the music and background noise, actors tend to speed up and drop the volume at the ends of their sentences, and of course there are those pesky accents. I'm seeing a lot of other good reasons in this thread, too.
  • balderdash 4y ago
    I think it’s this, if you want to have the volume at a level where conversations are understandable, the action scenes or other “high tension” moments are way too loud, and you spend your evening ride the volume control…
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      Yea, this is our family too. Volume button up and down, up and down, for 3 hours. I don't recall this being a problem with older movies, either. I feel like maybe modern moviemakers have access to sound pipelines with crazy vast dynamic range, and audio engineers feel they have to use every setting from "mouse quiet" to "nuclear bomb" in order to do their jobs right.
      • fleventynine 4y ago
        The best thing I ever did for my den was put one of these between the TV and the speakers: https://www.fmraudio.com/rnc.html https://www.fmraudio.com/rnc.html Twiddle a few knobs and now everything is the same volume and I can keep it at a nice low level and not wake the kids, but still hear everything.
        • AlbertCory 4y ago
          Interesting. Audacity has various compression settings. Have you tried that?
          • fleventynine 4y ago
• godmode2019 4y ago
  I just want to leave a comment to the people who said they turn it on for movies because they can't hear the audio over other movie sounds. If you can't hear the audio clearly the director didn't want to you to hear the audio correctly. Some scenes especially with thick accents the point is to be ambiguous, you having captions on is basically a cheat code to get more context than the director wanted you to have. Same goes for when someone speaks a foreign language, if the CC is not baked into the video layer I assume the director wanted me to be in the shoes of someone who cant understand a conversion and guess the characters intent. It's like reading a novel with pictures on every page, you don't need that much context, it robs your brains ability to infer with missing context.
• joeman1000 4y ago
  I started using subtitles to watch movies with my wife, who used to have trouble understanding American English. I’ve become so used to them that I use them on my own now. Could be a combination of: - Degraded hearing - Degraded audio comprehension, relying on the text - Realising how much I was missing, just due to bad audio mixing or low quality TV speakers - Getting over the ‘annoyance’ of having text pop up on screen & being able to view both the subject & text at once. I watched Top Gun (new) with my dad, he has a sound-bar setup and a HUGE TV. I honestly couldn’t understand 50% of the dialogue, and when I asked him to enable the subtitles he refused and said I should get my hearing checked. So I started asking him “what did they say?”, and to his surprise, half the time he couldn’t actually tell me what the actors were saying. It’s a mix of issues. I think that movie had horrible audio mastering and maybe a lot of media does these days too.
• presentation 4y ago
  This article focuses on accessibility in the USA, but living in Asia, for many years pretty much every major show and YouTuber across most Asian countries I’ve been to always has bright colorful subtitles (and onomatopoeia reactions too). On one hand I wonder why that became the dominant motif here far earlier than in Western markets; on the other I wonder if the this prompted the Western phenomenon from the article.
• balderdash 4y ago
  My personal view on this is that it’s because the soundtracks are so poorly modulated for volume that either the tv is way too loud when the action scenes/musical score happens and if you turn it down, you can’t hear when people are talking so people put their tv on a normal volume and turn cc on so they can read the 15% of the dialogue that is hard to track
• m3kw9 4y ago
  The caption used has a bit of FOMO(fear of missing out) psychology involved because sometimes the actors mumble a bit or talk a little too fast during action scenes
• JTbane 4y ago
  A lot of movies have awful mastering and action scenes are ear-splittingly loud, while dialogue is quiet.
• Ataraxic 4y ago
  Audio mixing has been absolutely terrible in so many productions that I started using subtitles a few years back and then I got used to them. If I want to really focus on the movie I usually turn the subtitles off because sometimes the subtitles are ahead of the scene a bit and then it spoils some key moments slightly. HOWEVER, when I fail to understand a word and the subtitles are off I rewind, turn them back on, and just leave them that way. If audio mixing was consistent and good I would leave them off.
• joshu 4y ago
  does anyone else get intensely annoyed when a) the closed captions misspell a word (or use the wrong word entirely) or b) when the captions don't match the spoken words (often on translated materials)?
• zrail 4y ago
  In our house captions went on the same day our first baby came home from the hospital and haven't been turned off since. Captions let parents of small children enjoy entertainment without bothering kids who may be sensitive to noise.
• ryandrake 4y ago
  One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the volume low and turn on subtitles--easy but shitty solution. Sound engineers need to stop needlessly flexing all that dynamic range that modern tools give them, and just produce a watchable movie. Actors need to go do some stage acting and learn how to e n u n c i a t e and project their voices.
  • bckr 4y ago
    Does your TV have dynamic range normalization (may be called "sound leveling" in the menu)?
    • Covzire 4y ago
      I've never seen an implementation of that that actually did what it claimed, even on a modestly high end Denon receiver it just ends up making all audio sound harsh.
  • pvarangot 4y ago
    I have the same issue but instead of using subtitles I've embraced not knowing what's going on with the show. If it was important that I know for my enjoyment then I'm probably not watching the show anymore. Like if what the actor said was unintelligible I'm going to go with that's part of the plot, a puzzle for me to figure out on the show subreddit or something, but I'm not going to deal with the shitty blinding subtitles some shows display on blinding white over pitch OLED black, it's impossible.
    • lawkwok 4y ago
      That’s how I watch movies in general. Maybe it’s a symptom of ADHD or lack of interest but I find it hard to remember people’s names and plot reveals that require me to remember to specific locations or details. I just watch movies and enjoy them “generally”.
• tom_ 4y ago
  I did this when I was 20-something too. A while ago now, as I am 45. UK TV back then had subtitles on teletext page 888. (And maybe it still does? I don't watch TV any more.) My flatmates and I would always switch this on when watching TV, as it meant we could talk, while still being able to keep track of what was going on in the programme.
• strangescript 4y ago
  I just get tired of shows with poor audio normalization and having the "what the heck did they just say" moments. Or one of my kids decides to randomly scream at the top of their lungs. And there is the whole blowing my ears out with rap music in my car because I thought it was cool growing up. I'm getting old.
• veryfancy 4y ago
  40yo here. I turned the subtitles on the help my little kids learn words as they watch. Now I love them. I’ll watch old movies - ones I’ve seen dozens of times - with the subs on and pick up things I never heard before.
• 19h 4y ago
  1) The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions. 2) With closed captions you can watch a movie on low volume without disturbing others and still understand every word even of the girl in the corner of the room barely utters a word. Source: I'm a "20-something".
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    > The reason TikTok etc. have closed captions on is that audio is off by default. If you want people to listen to your words but audio is off, put it into closed captions. I can't believe that whole dramatic article missed this very obvious reason.
    • jjulius 4y ago
      It didn't. When I downloaded it the other week to see what all the hubbub was about (spoiler alert: I killed it with fire lol), audio was on by default and I had to change that setting. I'd wager that OP forgot that they set it themselves.
      • plgodin 4y ago
        I think it depends on whether your phone is on silent.
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        Still, it's probably a common setting, or it's common to have your system-wide audio disabled when watching videos in public.
  • bigzyg33k 4y ago
    TikTok’s audio is on by default
  • jarboot 4y ago
    tiktok audio is not off by default. But it's right in the idea that some people will have the audio off, and cc means you can consume the content in either case.
• a-dub 4y ago
  does zoom have auto-captioning yet?
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  > They’re now a must-have for plenty of people without hearing loss, too, helping them better understand the audio or allowing them to multitask. Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway. This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives. They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true: 1) The TV is on. 2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise") 3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway). 4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV. 5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to. 6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever) In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house. But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes: 1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more. 2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here. Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s. [EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  It's just hard to hear the dialog in some movies, and I'm not hard of hearing. I think it was always like this, but you'd crank up the volume to overcome it. Now that I often watch on a laptop, that's not an option. Also there was the diner robbery scene in "Pulp Fiction." My brother said, "Let's turn on subtitles despite the fact that this guy is speaking English. I can't deal with the accent."
• downrightmike 4y ago
  Quiet talking so I have to turn it up and then a whole orchestra moves the fuck in and I have to scramble to lower the volume. No music please. The way they are handling it ruing the immersion.
• rendaw 4y ago
  Here's another speculation: A lot of movies, etc are mastered for surround sound and the single downmix is pretty terrible. It's actually quite a rabbit hole in the ffmpeg forums. But basically the non-front channels end up contributing too much volume and end up drowning out spoken voice a lot of the time. I know this happens on BD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix + co are using the same source, and 20-somethings probably don't have large places with surround sound systems.
• gloryjulio 4y ago
  Because why not? It's far more often than not that for whatever reasons the dialog sounds are just terrible. They don't care about the audience hearing the dialog(see Tenet). A show which guarantees that you can hear every line clearly is the outlier now. Might as well just set cc on to default
• happytoexplain 4y ago
  At first I assumed this was just going to be the writer being out of touch. Of course young people use subtitles. They're distracting and frequently ugly, but modern movies/shows have awful audio mixing, forcing you to turn it down, and mumbling/whispering dialogue. And we frequently watch things in environments where we don't want sound or headphones, e.g. TikTok or whatever in public or at night (and also, since these platforms start playback automatically, you'd otherwise miss something). And of course, we watch things that aren't in English. But then I read all the accounts of people who can't explain why they turn on subtitles, aside from "I just like it" or "I'm just used to it", and I just... I feel confused, angry. I AM the out of touch old person.
• jdofaz 4y ago
  I've done this for a long time, I first turned the captions on out of novelty when we got a TV that had a CC decoder built in. After a while I found it useful and left it on most of the time
• jimbob45 4y ago
  As a closed caption user, I partially use it to try and improve my vocabulary. On the fly, it’s very easy to hear a word like “hoi polloi” and not know how to spell it. In that case, that’s a missed learning opportunity. Also, closed captions make watching TV on mute seamless and that’s fantastic if you like to intersperse your viewing with conversation.
• egypturnash 4y ago
  One reason neither the article nor the comments here are mentioning: lots of videos are now designed to be Content in an Endless Feed, and are made with the intent of capturing your interest even if you're sitting there with your phone muted. Text floating on the screen increases the chance of making you stop scrolling and rack up that precious view count.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dangerwill 4y ago
  I'm in my 30s and I use subtitles for everything because I don't have the absolute best hearing and I was an anime fan growing up so it never felt weird. Doesn't the Wall Street Journal have better things to be doing other than trying to make a false generational divide over subtitles? Like seriously, this kind of needless naval gazing from a supposedly serious outlet just frustrates me so much.
  • boltzmann-brain 4y ago
    Fully agreed - it's not a generational thing at all. They're just continuing the "nolan bad" meme that's been going around in double force since tenet came out. Watch them make another article about subtitles focusing on nolan soon enough, it's coming for sure.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    Ironically we could be creating a generational divide over the fact that older people seem to like to categorize and explain away the youth without proper insight into the matter.
• pkamb 4y ago
  Please, an Apple TV feature that just automatically turns on Closed Captioning whenever you Skip Back 15 seconds. I don't want to ask Siri every time.
  • sowbug 4y ago
    Netflix used to have this. I don't know why they got rid of it.
• dhosek 4y ago
  Speaking of captioning, why the expletive deleted do I have to turn on captions every single time I enter a meeting in Google Meet, Teams, Zoom (which makes it really hard to get captions), Slack Huddle (which I’m not sure if it has captions or not now because the last time I was in one I couldn’t find a setting to turn it on), BlueJeans, etc.? I’m signed into every single one of these and using a dedicated app in many cases and yet every single one forgets that I always need captions. In contrast, all the video streaming services that I use don’t require me to turn on captioning after the first time.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    I believe this is because these settings are linked to the host in some of these apps. For instance, captions can be blocked by the host on Zoom. There is no such aspect to consider when streaming video for a single user. How do I know this? I once organized a session on accessibility and it turned out a deaf guest had the captions blocked by our IT guy who didn't understand what was going on...
• pensatoio 4y ago
  Modern sound engineers seem to expect that I own several thousand dollars of high-end sound equipment capable of reproducing the full dynamic range they've sculpted. It's super annoying.
• jedberg 4y ago
  I'm the kind of person who concentrates when I watch TV -- if I can't give it my full attention I don't watch. I'm 45 BTW. I used to hate subtitles -- found them super distracting. Then I met my wife, whose family always watched with them on. In part because English is their second language, and as I learned later, in part because some of the relatives are very loud and talk over everything. Now I can't watch without them. Maybe between getting used to them and having kids and the crappy mixes with the dialogue too quiet, I need them now. I feel like I'm missing something without them.
• adhd1110101 4y ago
  Anyone else watch on mute without subtitles?
• hsjshdjsksj 4y ago
• kayodelycaon 4y ago
  I always have them on because I have audio processing issues. Due to ADHD and other problems, my brain can’t process in real time. If I have difficulty understanding something, my brain stops hearing while I attempt to figure out what was said. My auditory memory has no buffering ability. If I’m reading, I’m both able to understand faster and reread if I need to.
  • viburnum 4y ago
    Same here. I’m also less like to reach for my phone if I have something to read on screen.
• iwanttocomment 4y ago
  So, television captions were terrible until the dawn of streaming. One could argue that DVDs (circa late '90s) were OK, but the captions were cartoonish, pixelated nightmare captions that nobody wanted on their TV, just as bad as the typical "closed captioning" of live network television. Decent captioning really didn't occur until the age of Blu-ray and streaming, around 15 years ago; 1080p captions that were inobtrusive and in lockstep with the dialogue at hand. The 20-somethings would have grown up with perfectly acceptable, inobtrusive captions, and thus have no issue keeping them on-screen to avoid confusion when keeping the television volume at a reasonable volume. I'm no 20-something, and we keep Blu-ray and streaming captions on in our household. This is a new thing in the past 10-15 years, and it has to do entirely with the quality of captioning and nothing having to do with anything else.
• bigmatto 4y ago
  It's vitally important to have a 2 second delay with closed captions. Without the delay you may start reading the dialog in advance, this degrades your enjoyment of the movie. Better to listen, and have the subtitles there as a backup 2 seconds later for anything you miss.
• hota_mazi 4y ago
  Note: if you want to read the article, copy the title, paste it into Google search, and click on the first result. When you do that, the whole article will be displayed. If you just click on the link above, WSJ will display a paywall. This is due to one of Google's requirements that if they index your page, it needs to be fully accessible when clicked.
• stack_framer 4y ago
  My kids watch everything with closed captioning on (ages 10 and 7)! I think now I know why, and it's my fault: I used to always tell them to turn the dang volume down. I guess then they couldn't hear the dialogue, so they figured out how to turn on closed captioning.
  • jessaustin 4y ago
    It's probably good that your 7yo is better at reading than many adults.
• jononomo 4y ago
  My favorite movie of all time is City of God, which is entirely in Portugese. Somehow the captions don't lessen that movie for me at all.
• hedora 4y ago
  Does YouTube have auto captioning that works? Can I just use lynx or something to browse technical documentation on it instead of watching a slooowww PowerPoint presentation? The article suggests tiktok has such a thing.
  • csours 4y ago
    YouTube autogenerated subtitles are very hit or miss. They work pretty well for the 90% case, but the 10% they fail on are usually the interesting parts
• csours 4y ago
  You know, maybe this is why I like YouTube better than movies and episodic "TV" content. YouTube videos have to have good audio, or they never survive the algorithm (I'm sure you can find counterexamples).
• nomilk 4y ago
  TL;DR people are turning on closed captions (i.e. subtitles of the same language as the video) to increase their focus. I've been doing something slightly similar in reading Fawlty Towers scripts [1] on my phone while watching the episodes, and it yielded about 20% more jokes (ones I'd missed in the past, even from 10+ viewings of each episode!). For example, Basil mumbling this brilliancy in his initial exchange with Mr Hutchinson: > In a nutshell > Case, more like. [1] https://subslikescript.com/series/Fawlty_Towers-72500/season-1/episode-4-The_Hotel_Inspectors https://subslikescript.com/series/Fawlty_Towers-72500/season...
• pookeh 4y ago
  Everyone has FOMO syndrome.
• noveltyaccount 4y ago
  I started doing this when watching Game of Thrones. Had a hard time with some of the accents so periodically would rewind and turn on captions. After a while, I just left them on and literally never turned them off, all these years later. Especially now that I have a toddler I like that I can have the volume low and not miss anything.
• sph 4y ago
  I turned them on 15 years ago when I was trying to get better at understanding English accents and never turned them off. I don't use subs on Youtube for example, but I hate watching a movie or TV show without, and my movie download pipeline automatically fetches them for me. I tried to wean myself off, but I'd rather keep them on and never miss a line because of terrible mixing or noisy living room.
• shadowofneptune 4y ago
  It lets me and my friends talk over the movie without missing much. Do other people not do that? EDIT: Come to think of it, makes DVD commentaries much more useful as well.
• joshka 4y ago
  Words per minute spoken - 120-150 Words per minute read - 220-350 When doing some other task side by side with consuming a movie with captions, the combination of reading and hearing allow a better comprehension than just one or the other. E.g. side tasks like reading twitter, playing a game, sending a text message. When captions replace the aural mode, this allows enough time to interleave attention (e.g. watching a movie while browsing TikTok on mute).
• eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I have auditory processing difficulties. Among many other sensory challenges. Sitting at a table in a restaurant, I struggle to understand what my friends are saying to me over the din of background chatter, a bartender shaking a drink, back of the house clinking a pan. I similarly struggle to understand what actors are saying when they’re backed by theme music or other physical things going on as part of (or behind) the story. Captions help me actually consume video rather than feel lost in it. Without text I pretty much would stop consuming video entirely. Granted, I’m 40 so I can’t speak for the youngs. And I hear just fine in that the sounds are all present in my ears and my brain. They just get jumbled and being able to catch up with text helps immensely.
  • aviditas 4y ago
    As one of the younger but not young crowd, I have a form of auditory dyslexia which is why I've used CC and subtitles most of my life. Good sound mixing and actor enunciation helps to a small degree, but my brain garbles the first part of conversation starts and when dialog happens without visual cues. My hearing is good, but the delays in processing dialog to content make watching movies or tv very frustrating when I can't see the actor's face to lip read or don't have CC to catch what I miss. On the other side of things, I have a very high level of internal voice so when I am reading text I can 'hear' the dialog in my head. I can listen to the first 20 minutes of a movie or episode or two of a tv show, then watch it muted with subtitles and will hear the actor's voices. It's nice because I can watch shows with my own background music or without disturbing anyone with the audio.
• dirtyid 4y ago
  Not only subs, but I wonder what the uptake on describe audio is. Disney does a particulalry good job, and I treat many shows as radio drama for background now.
• ttjjtt 4y ago
  One aspect that’s under recognized is the widespread use of ADR (automatic dialog replacement) https://filmlifestyle.com/what-is-adr-in-filmmaking/ https://filmlifestyle.com/what-is-adr-in-filmmaking/ In the 80s and 90s this was an occasionally used process to fix problematic scenes, now it’s used for 70-100% of a full, particularly high budget. The actors sit in an anechoic sound recording room and whisper their lines a few cm from a microphone They’ll do this even if the camera POV is meters away from the character in a busy environment, where the any human would be talking loudly straining to be heard over the background noise. ADR makes all dialog recording sound like soft pillow talk. Add incessant overproduced over compressed music score to the mix, a 5.1 to stereo downmix, and you have an incomprehensible movie.
• Too 4y ago
  Not mentioned in the article is the type of content watched. Concluding the audio mixing disaster discussed above, one theory would be: Young people watch fast Marvel actions with explosions and terrible audio mixing. Old people watch slow crime mysteries with no background music.
• zoid_ 4y ago
  Having young kids makes subtitles essential if you want to watch the news or any other low quality media in the background whilst they are playing! Got used to it after a couple of years and found them useful for deciphering speech that would otherwise be missed.
• racl101 4y ago
  My hearing sucks. There.
• TT-392 4y ago
  Anyone else here super annoyed by the closed captions rendering on netflix. They basically don't have a usable font / color choice, and the captions are randomly ahead or behind the audio all the time. I have a netflix account, but I just don't bother watching foreign subtitled content on it anymore. Of course my solution is pirating content I already pay for.
• zengief 4y ago
  A new hearing loss modality seems to be gaining traction -- "hidden" hearing loss. A core symptom is difficulty parsing speech in noisy environments. Caused by repeated exposure to loud noises. Don't know if folks around here are going clubbing much but I'm under the impression that it's gotten way louder recently. Live music as a whole is pretty popular these days. Apparently most who have it don't have the classic symptoms: tinnitus or hearing loss picked up at the audiologist's office.
  • troad 4y ago
    I definitely have this. My friends can usually understand one another shouting in a moderately loud bar; I can’t understand them at all. I don’t know if it’s technically hearing loss though; I feel like I can hear the noises my friends are making, I just can’t segregate them from the background noise enough to parse the former as speech.
    • KineticLensman 4y ago
      I wear hearing aids for moderate hearing loss. They are optimised for picking out speech from the background sounds and in the open air or rooms that have good acoustics my comprehension can be better than people with notionally better hearing. But some sounds are very effective jammers for hearing aids, notably running water, boiling kettles and, unfortunately, the ambient noises in typical restaurants.
• baby 4y ago
  Interestingly nobody in France needs subtitles. But when I watch english movies and shows I do need them. I was surprised when I realized that Americans used subtitles to watch American shows as well. It reminded me of China. I still remember watching Tenet and feeling like it was just another movie I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have subtitles. And then I realized that even native speakers couldn’t understand it.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  Speaking of shameful, anti-human behaviour related to closed captions, I have some pet peeves that would be trivial to fix, but major production companies simply refuse to implement. (There are ZERO excuses for all of the below. None. It's just text on a screen, displayed by dedicated apps on Smart TVs, fully equipped with CPUs and GPUs! Netflix staff especially that come across this thread: You should be ashamed. Shame. Shame. Shame.) 1. English subtitles != English subtitles for the hearing impaired. I don't want "Breathes loudly" and "Bang!" over action scenes. I live in a household where everyone's second language is English, and if I turn the subtitles on for them, the extra sound-effects subtitles drive me crazy. 2. Can't have multiple subtitles for mixed-language households. My partner prefers subtitles in her language, but then if there's a scene in an English-language movie with a short foreign-language segment in it, I have to pause, switch to English for the hearing impaired (see point #1), and then pause and switch back when the scene is over. I should be able to select any two or even three subtitle languages, such as "auto english + japanese", or whatever. 3. Can't have subtitles in some languages. Netflix in particular loves to waste $500K annual total comp on data scientists who analyse their market segments to select the "top 5" languages in each market region. Don't speak one of those languages? Tough titties, no subtitles for you! It's not even a matter of copyright or distribution rights. They do this for their own productions too! They do it because some idiot at Netflix thought too many options was "hard to navigate". You know what's even harder? Trying to understand a movie when it doesn't have subtitles matching your language!! 4. Eye-searing HDR subtitles. Netflix again. On my Sony OLED TV the subtitles use the HDR max-brightness white. They illuminate my entire room and look like someone is trying to burn the text into my retinas with high-powered flashlights. This cannot be adjusted... for some languages. For like, no reason. English: can be fixed! French: yes. Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Romanian, Traditional Chinese, and Thai: BURN YOUR HEATHEN EYEBALLS! See: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100267 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100267
• gareth_untether 4y ago
  My wife loves having subtitles on for all the reasons listed in the article. I, on the other hand, prefer to just listen. I've found since watching with subtitles my ability to lip read and understand tricky accents has no dived.
• novok 4y ago
  For how popular this is, streaming providers and major video websites like youtube sure phone it in with subtitle placement. They could do basic shit, like force the subtitles to be within the black bars as much as possible with some basic algorithmic programming, or just spend one person day laying out the subtitles better or just approach an iota of the effort that most fansub groups do.
• weinzierl 4y ago
  For the language learners: There is an extension for Chrome that lets you display captions in two languages simultaneously. You can also lookup every word in the dictionary with a single click. It used to be called "Language Learning with Netflix" but they rebranded it and I can't remember the new name right now. I'm not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.
  • bertman 4y ago
    It's called "Language Reactor" now. https://www.languagereactor.com/ https://www.languagereactor.com/
• zzo38computer 4y ago
  I use captions too, even though I can (usually) hear the TV. There are many reasons for this: - I think it makes it somewhat easier to understand than audio only, for one thing. - If you do not know what they said, because you have missed it, possibly due to other noise in the room (telephone, other people speaking, etc). - Sometimes the speech of the movie is difficult due to e.g. you do not understand the accent of their speech, etc. - If you want to reduce the volume or mute to not bother other people. - If you do not know how to spell someone's name, or an obscure word. (Unfortunately, sometimes the caption writers do not know, and do it wrong.) - In some shows, they will mention the name of a piece of music; this can help in case you do not know. (They do not always do this, though.) However, there are often problems with them. For example, sometimes the caption writers do not know what they are saying, either. The caption writers should try to make an effort to find out what they are saying (and the proper spelling), by whatever means are appropriate, e.g. referring to the script, asking the people there, watching the show twice to make corrections if necessary, etc. (This might not always be possible, e.g. live shows that are broadcast as they are being filmed rather than being edited later, but they should do it when possible.) I also sometimes see worthless captions, e.g. "male announcer reads words on screen". I think that is worthless, and should be omitted. (If you can specify "hidden captions", then it may be useful to encode the text which is already part of the picture, as a hidden caption and then allow it to be displayed in a caption scrollback menu if the TV system you are using has such a menu (I do not know of any that do have it, but it is something that I would think would be good to have).) A good feature of captions is that you can turn on/off, and can customize fonts/opacity on some receivers (I personally prefer translucent captions). (DVD video only allows on/off (and selection by language, sometimes), although it should also be possible to allow adjusting colours/opacity (since DVD subtitles are encoded as pictures using indexed colours), although font changing will not be possible.)
  • pnut 4y ago
    Those worthless captions are audio description for the hearing impaired.
    • zzo38computer 4y ago
• trog 4y ago
  In my mid forties and gave up on trying to understand the audio a couple years ago. Recently bought a sound bar which has helped quite a bit with the audio quality - apparently it's one with emphasis on centre channel so should have better voice output? - but we're still rocking the subtitles. The big downside is I tend to read them much faster. So I'm often laughing at jokes several seconds before my partner as apparently I read faster than they do!
  • Bakary 4y ago
    It's not just a case of hearing loss. Much of the time, the soundmixing is just godawful.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• krzyk 4y ago
  More important question: Why subtitles are called "closed captions"?
  • epakai 4y ago
    Open captions refer to captions that are part of the video image (sometimes called burned in). In movies they might be used to pass setting information for a scene like time or location. Closed captions are encoded separately and their display is elective.
    • cratermoon 4y ago
      Today I Learned. Thank you.
• zimpenfish 4y ago
  Reiterating the many "sound mixes are terrible, subtitles are vital" comments but also adding that my ears basically can't process more than one sound at a time - if there's external noise (someone commenting on the TV, the feral children outside, a party in the park across the square, washing machine / dishwasher, etc.), it'll interfere with my understanding of the dialogue. Hence subtitles.
• Havoc 4y ago
  There is also the reverse - I don't want hearing loss so I refuse to jack up the volume. Which in turn makes things harder to hear so captions help Plus yeah they're a little lagged so helpful for multitasking if you miss a fraction of a sentence. Lets you recover from the gap without rewinding the vid
• shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  all around bad audio engineering. sounds sound different on different hardware.
• knorker 4y ago
  being on the wrong side of 40 the CC was to me always available. I always hated them. So now I hate it double. Either can't understand dialog, or need obnoxious un-immersive subtitles turned on. So most of the time watching I have to have make an effort to my eyes stay away from the bottom part of the screen, only to "check the cheat sheet" when they start mumbling or ruin the movie with terrible mixing. It's not the viewer. It's the content. It seems like most content now. Tenet is just the parody of it, ironically parodying before most of the phenomenon had bloomed.
• nottorp 4y ago
  I'm from a country that has always subtitled movies so this doesn't even sound weird to me. (I watch foreign movies in a language that i know with subtitles in the original language though.) But in the case of tiktok and netflix, it's probably because the content isn't worth your full attention...
• idonotknowwhy 4y ago
  Audio mixing has been shit for a good 15 years. I don't want a cinema experience when the kids are trying to sleep. If I play a 1990s movie on my crt with the built in speaker (yes, in 2022) it's fine. Try to play something on Netflix and the sound effects and music are full blast while the mumbled voices are really quiet.
• jarym 4y ago
  Yea not 20-something but a couple of decades older… also prefer subtitles. As others have said, sometimes actors mumble stuff, dialogue is hard to hear and explosions and other side noises end up too loud. Shame but someone thought this was a good idea…
• phyalow 4y ago
  I watch nearly everything I can at somewhere between 1.8-2.5x speed, this means subs are largely required to maintain comprehension. I prefer watching this way as I can cover far greater amounts of content (or devote less time on the otherhand) just as enjoyably as I could watching at regular speed.
• miked85 4y ago
  In my experience it's not just 20-somethings. I've sometimes started watching something with CC accidentally turned on, and then realized it made the clip/movie/whatever easier to understand. My parents use it as well, and it has nothing to do with hearing loss.
• pts_ 4y ago
  I am not under 40 but I like reading captions because it's less effort than putting on headphones or buds, and keeps me aware of surroundings.
• hrbf 4y ago
  Unless I’m missing something major, the article does not answer its headline question in any way. It just presents a bunch of examples but does not come to any conclusion.
  • cratermoon 4y ago
    Par for the course with question titles. Betteridge's law of headlines says: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[1]. That rule, however, doesn't apply to "why?" questions because they are not yes/no constructions. Nevertheless, there's an aspect of Betteridge's law at work here. Running a story that doesn't really have anything to it yet needing to meet production targets – in the old days, column-inches to fill, today, space to place ads. Reporters are required to produce a certain number of articles of a certain length per week. An honest headline would just say, in effect, that after looking into it, the reporter didn't find an answer. An honest headline might be OK in newsprint. Online, the drive for "engagement" requires a headline that will lure readers in, and thus sell ads. tl;dr money.
    • cratermoon 4y ago
      Forgot the reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226202006/http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/02/techcrunch-irresponsible-journalism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090226202006/http://www.techno...
• raydiatian 4y ago
  The irony of having the word “accessibility” in your article headline Followed by a stout paywall.
• Jolter 4y ago
  I turn them on because I’ll be eating chips.
• EasyTiger_ 4y ago
  It helps them to "consume content"
• schwartzworld 4y ago
  I'm 40. When I was 9 I made friends with a girl who was a CODA, a child of deaf adults. Her parents' TV was the first time I learned captions existed and I was immediately hooked. Back then you couldn't rewind if you didn't understand and important piece of dialogue, and being able to read while you watch absolutely helped with not missing those moments. My parents didn't like my shows too loud, so captions just made them better. I got in the habit of turning on CC all the time, except live shows which were usually not worth the effort. 30 years later I still love captions. When my children are sleeping in the next room, I can keep the volume low. The only downside is that sometimes captions ruin the jokes.
• tomrod 4y ago
  We started watching with closed captions so we could watch while the little ones were small. We never stopped.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  I'm sure the audio mixes have something to do with it, but I also just like to read. I hear just fine but I wish I had closed captioning in real life!
• davesque 4y ago
  Wsj knows their audience. They're the folks who want to frame everything in terms of all the weird and entitled things that 20-somethings do. They're sure to get their clicks with that title.
• jononomo 4y ago
  I have never understood surround sound: just mix the audio in mono and make sure that every word can be cleanly heard by my father who is 85 and uses a hearing aid. As an unintended side effect your movie will be more widely appreciated by every other demographic. The premise of surround sound is that it is extremely important to know the direction that the sound is coming from -- but when you sacrifice the audience's understanding of what is happening in the movie to achieve this sound directionality, then you've completely lost the plot.
  • BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    I seem to be missing the gene that most people my age have that requires them to have 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and I consider myself to be somewhat of a movie connoisseur. Actually, maybe that's why. I can feel immersed in a movie without needing the sound to 'prove' it. The picture is still that little window in front of me, why does the sound need to be all over? Happy to be educated as to all the reasons I'm missing out on 'the real experience' though.
  • acuozzo 4y ago
    > just mix the audio in mono and make sure that every word can be cleanly heard by my father who is 85 and uses a hearing aid Unfortunately, this would trash the theatrical mix. Dialogue would roar from the center channel with every other channel operating at a whisper. The right solution is to produce two mixes: a stereo home mix and a surround theatrical one. Make the stereo home mix the default. Any *-phile is going to make sure the movie is using the right mix beforehand anyway.
    • jononomo 4y ago
      There is zero need for surround sound -- the plot is infinitely more important than knowing which direction a sound came from. Surround sound is completely and utterly a waste in every respect.
      • acuozzo 4y ago
        There is zero need for color -- the plot is infinitely more important than knowing the hair color of its actors. Color is completely and utterly a waste in every respect. There is zero need for widescreen -- There is zero need for high definition -- There is zero need for stereo audio -- There is zero need for digital home video -- The plot is infinitely more important than any of the aforementioned gimmicks. All we need is B&W+mono on RCA SelectaVision CEDs playing on 9" round CRT TVs. If the mains for the TV has a ground wire, then it's too new! Hell, we can do one better: https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-televisi-1819565469 https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...
• BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  I vote for subtitles as an over-40. I started literally requiring subtitles due to the presence of children (whom I dearly love) in the house and all the other various household sounds like kettles boiling or dishwashers or washing machines or toilet flushes or whatever the fuck else. But I can't go back. I've re-watched movies with subtitles and found explanations of things (non-plot critical, but contributory or interesting) that were previously drowned out by mumbling or poor mixing or just not having the volume high enough to vibrate the foundations. Subtitles explain all! (I actually find it's harder to multitask if I'm watching a show, because I need to read the screen - this isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's a show I've actually chosen to try to watch). P.S. 2nd episode of the latest season of Rick and Morty has an ... interesting ... differentiation between the subtitles and spoken words for one specific word starting with c, in which the subtitle was the original, category* 0, word, whilst the obviously replaced word also started with c but is a somewhat more acceptable category* 2 word. *categories made up by me on the spot.
  • conorcleary 4y ago
    Without subtitles you can go back later and rewatch a fairly different show for the first time :)
• oh_my_goodness 4y ago
  One more vote for "it's not my age, it's the mumbling and the sound engineering."
• aasasd 4y ago
  Idk what you can do with streaming services, but old-school VLC users can dodge „whisper and explosions“ by turning dynamic compression to the max. In theory one can use systemwide in-line effects with something like AU Lab to the same end, but that's kind of a pain at least on Mac, mostly because virtual audio devices like ‘Blackhole’ tend to not work. Perhaps the paid ‘Loopback’ does work, dunno. Also funny how USians complain en masse about volume too loud (with the trademark ‘shaking the house’), when with a simple pair of desktop speakers it would be physically impossible to have that problem. Man buys big speakers, surprised to discover that they provide loud sound.
• rch 4y ago
  I watch Netflix with captions on and the sound low or muted, so I can multitask reading other things. It's easier to follow parallel streams of text than voice and text at the same time.
• charlieyu1 4y ago
  AI caption sucks, not closed to the real captions. Is a 38 years old who watched anime since at least 20 years ago. There were people who delicates into translating new anime episodes with captions every week. The best teams have it done within 3 hours after the episode is aired in Japan.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  I'll add one more reason -- TV shows often require you to pay attention to every word now. Thirty years ago, if you missed a line of dialog, it wasn't usually a big deal. Now if you're watching Westworld? If you misunderstand a single line that might be the entire difference between "solving" the episode or not. TV has gone from a "casual" experience you can tune in and out of, to a kind of literary-precision experience that demands your undivided attention, for many shows. CC makes sure you understand every word, which just wasn't usually that important previously.
  • okdood64 4y ago
    Agreed. There's still older shows, or even new simple "popcorn-flick" movies that I can watch without subtitles just fine, because of a simpler plot line and cast of characters. For example, compare a show like Lost against Westworld. With Lost each scene was so drawn out, that even if you missed a line, you'd be able to figure out what's going on from the general context.
  • mehphp 4y ago
    I’ve had the same experience. Watching shows like that with the captions on makes me realize how much I miss with them off. I’ve had a few instances where I didn’t “get” what had happened; I thought maybe it was just over my head. Turns out, I just missed some key dialogue is all.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Wider selection of movies, from all over the world. Dialect, accent, unexpected word choices can make whole conversations illegible in that sense.
• everforward 4y ago
  I think part of this is the relatively new diversity of media. People are getting used to subtitles because of foreign languages, and like being able to make out every word. Likewise for shows that have very thick accents; there are a few accents that become utterly undecipherable to me if they're thick enough, especially with the crap speakers built into TV's. Once I got used to having them on for stuff I needed them for, I tend to leave them on unless I'm watching carefully and it bugs me that they block part of the screen.
• dopeboy 4y ago
  The comments in this thread are unusually interesting because everyone is chiming in with different reasons. A lot of diversity in the reasoning.
• Jugurtha 4y ago
  I was watching "Our Flag Means Death" recently. I turned on closed captions because I don't speak pirate.
• bigbillheck 4y ago
  Pushing 50, and don't really watch tv any more, but in my 20s and 30s I would regularly watch tv with captions on and sound off. Made it a lot easier to tune out ads.
• acconrad 4y ago
  1. I watch foreign films so that’s how I got started 2. Then I put on CC so I could watch things at 2-3x and still keep up 3. I’ve got young kids and I can’t watch shows at times with the volume up if everyone else is sleeping 4. I got it as a tip for kids shows too so children can see the words they are hearing. Helps them reinforce their vocabulary. So it’s always on if the kids are watching tv. What’s not to like about CC?
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  I use captions often when I'm using 2x speed.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  This highlights a thought I have. There are 2 schools of thought. 1 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the people (their age usually, sometimes their wokeness, or there race, or there politics) and 2 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the environment (having internet now, different economics now, ratio of cost of living to income now, etc). I tend to fall into more #2. It's not that "kids these days" do this. It's that movies and TV these days does this. If a younger person is watching an Seinfeld episode from 30 years ago there is no need for subtitles, if an older person like me is watching a TV show or movie that came out this week It's likely that subtitles would help anyone, of any age, follow the story. As other comments here have noted. It has to do with the huge dynamic range on audio in most new film/TV. In my view it's not a "kids these days" thing, it's a "content these days" thing. I think that most things are this way. We read about how younger generations aren't as into home buying, nope. Economics have changed, they're not as able.
• vivegi 4y ago
  Slightly off topic, but one thing that annoys me is most movies made in the last 15 years that end up showing smartphones and text messages or the actors typing on their phone and most of the time the text is too small, or the camera cuts too fast and I end up pausing/rewinding to check it again. Very few movies actually put an overlay and show such conversations using legible text. If the messages are important for the plot, it would be great if the filmmakers took care of this aspect. This is quite bad with many streaming shows.
• rapjr9 4y ago
  If you find dialog is difficult to understand you might try adding a sonic maximizer (for example Behringer Sonic Ultramizer or BBE Maximizer), a sonic exciter (Behringer Sonic Exciter or Aphex Aural Exciter), and maybe a little compression and plate reverb.
• HeavenBanned 4y ago
  Can we please bring back the transatlantic accent?
• accidentalborg 4y ago
  I land in a bit of a weird spot on this topic. Personally, I loathe using subtitles or CC because switching between trying to watch what's happening in the scene and quickly reading the text at the bottom of the screen over and over throughout a show or film leaves me feeling like I can't relax and enjoy it, even when I can hear what's happening just fine. On the other hand, unfortunately, as many others have said - modern audio mixes almost force subtitles to be turned on, making it a 'necessary evil'.
• musicale 4y ago
  I wish more people would use captions in public spaces, rather than setting their phones to maximum volume.