4 ms·

I'm sorry but that video is literally unwatchable! What in the world is happening with the audio/subtitles?

anonymous908213 9mo ago
Youtube ruins videos with godawful AI-generated autodubbing if it detects a video in a language that differs from your locale. You can access the original audio from the settings cog.
- anal_reactor 9mo ago
  YouTube is literally unusable without browser extensions or a third-party app
- netsharc 9mo ago
  It doesn't even respect the locale of the user interface, but uses IP geolocation and sends you HTML containing the video titles in the language it "knows" you want... And there is no setting to change this.
  - andy99 9mo ago
    Big tech has changed over the last bit to trying to tell us exactly what and how we should think - or maybe more precisely to see thought as “friction” and want to remove it all together. This is a very minor example in the scheme of things, but I see it everywhere now.
    - shalmanese 9mo ago
      Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.
      - andy99 9mo ago
        Why wouldn’t you just ask them, and particularly for media like this that has a native language, default to that? I don’t want software to think for me about what I want to see, if I want something different I’ll change it.
        shalmanese 9mo ago
        You're going down the first question of a deep rabbithole that eventually lands you to where every major tech company has landed.
        deaux 9mo ago
        Got it, "maximizing ad revenue " it is.
      - deaux 9mo ago
        Yet this implementation that Youtube uses is in the bottom 1% of worst ones. Strange how roughly every other website/app does a better job at it.
        netsharc 9mo ago
        It's probably Microservices(TM)... The black box responsible for rendering the HTML is some other black box to the UI or whatever. The UI offers you locale options, but the renderer that fetches video titles hasn't been configured to respect this, probably uses locale from geolocation and some overpaid genius said "always use machine translation if locale doesn't match video title language"... The homepage of google.com is also localized. I remember noticing that even when requesting and getting the English locale, the tooltip for the doodle was still in my region's language... wahey!
- AniseAbyss 9mo ago
  I learned English when I was a child because all the media I wanted to consume were not translated into Dutch. Makes you wonder if universal translators ever become the norm people will still bother to learn foreign language.
  - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    I would! Learning Japanese has been a mind-stretching experience. And there's just some passages of literature that you can't translate. Or rather, you can but it just doesn't work, simply because the target language doesn't let you structure or rhyme in the same way as the source language. Every language has a potential for generating unique literature simply because each language has a unique vocabulary + sentence structure.

Youtube ruins videos with godawful AI-generated autodubbing if it detects a video in a language that differs from your locale. You can access the original audio from the settings cog.

anal_reactor 9mo ago
YouTube is literally unusable without browser extensions or a third-party app
netsharc 9mo ago
It doesn't even respect the locale of the user interface, but uses IP geolocation and sends you HTML containing the video titles in the language it "knows" you want... And there is no setting to change this.
- andy99 9mo ago
  Big tech has changed over the last bit to trying to tell us exactly what and how we should think - or maybe more precisely to see thought as “friction” and want to remove it all together. This is a very minor example in the scheme of things, but I see it everywhere now.
  - shalmanese 9mo ago
    Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.
    - andy99 9mo ago
      Why wouldn’t you just ask them, and particularly for media like this that has a native language, default to that? I don’t want software to think for me about what I want to see, if I want something different I’ll change it.
      - shalmanese 9mo ago
        You're going down the first question of a deep rabbithole that eventually lands you to where every major tech company has landed.
        deaux 9mo ago
        Got it, "maximizing ad revenue " it is.
    - deaux 9mo ago
      Yet this implementation that Youtube uses is in the bottom 1% of worst ones. Strange how roughly every other website/app does a better job at it.
      - netsharc 9mo ago
        It's probably Microservices(TM)... The black box responsible for rendering the HTML is some other black box to the UI or whatever. The UI offers you locale options, but the renderer that fetches video titles hasn't been configured to respect this, probably uses locale from geolocation and some overpaid genius said "always use machine translation if locale doesn't match video title language"... The homepage of google.com is also localized. I remember noticing that even when requesting and getting the English locale, the tooltip for the doodle was still in my region's language... wahey!
AniseAbyss 9mo ago
I learned English when I was a child because all the media I wanted to consume were not translated into Dutch. Makes you wonder if universal translators ever become the norm people will still bother to learn foreign language.
- MarsIronPI 9mo ago
  I would! Learning Japanese has been a mind-stretching experience. And there's just some passages of literature that you can't translate. Or rather, you can but it just doesn't work, simply because the target language doesn't let you structure or rhyme in the same way as the source language. Every language has a potential for generating unique literature simply because each language has a unique vocabulary + sentence structure.