Youtube removing community caption feature by september.

[Tech_Dreamer]

Youtube is ending CC community contribution feature that lets youtube users to add subtitles as a community contributors to the videos, it will still be allowing original user to upload subtitles that they make, but will disable community uploading feature option by September 28th this year.

 

 

Closed Caption community contribution is a feature if it's allowed by the uploader, there will be an option available for anyone with a youtube account to upload their own subtitles that they made using any software , for example like amara to create a sub file upload a .srt file to match with the video translation. the file will stay hidden until channel user approves it manually & later it goes live.

 

if the feature is enabled, contributors can go to this menu in the subtitles option & upload a sub file manually picking whichever language they what it translated.

 

 

This feature is an immensely helpful feature for people who have audience overseas with their first/mother language isn't English & the subtitles uploaded by their community from someone in that region becomes extremely helpful to the ordinary viewers who wants accurate translation provided by their community.

 

Other main beneficiary to this feature was deaf people. although small fraction most of the User uploaded subtitles are far more accurate than the horrendous YouTube auto-generated subtitles that sometimes makes no sense. this on English, imagine it going through another filter to translate to another language.shit gets seriously complex.

 

Quote

 

While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators, it’s rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse.

• Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the community contributions feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions. As a result, the feature is rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month. Instead, creators are using YouTube’s alternative captioning tools. 

We’ve decided to discontinue the Community Contributions feature across all channels after September 28, 2020. You can still use manual and automatic captions, as well as third party tools and services. 

 

 

Obviously some of the users were infuriated & ranted on social media.

Aaaaand theres already a change.org petition, why do people do that? like it makes any sort of difference?

 

Anyways what do you guys think, post comments down below. i think it's a blunt short sighted move.theyve been making lots of unnecessary changes a lot lately, ever since that Tati & James charles drama leading upto the subcount rounding up & blocking soicial blade app from having data & changing comment section on mobiles etc.hopefully they wont go down the drain & into shit like those other online media platforms.

 

does Linus use this feature in any of his channel contents? post down below.

 

 

source:

 

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21349401/youtube-community-captions-deaf-creators-accessibility-google

https://www.engadget.com/youtube-community-contributions-saying-goodbye-141205281.html

 

[xAcid9]

A lot of non-english content creator that rely on community added subs gonna be piss imo. 

[DeScruff]

Yeah this is gonna be a huge problem for those 'VTubers' ( Usually its 3D anime girls who run youtube channels )
Example:

Usually it's fans who translate the videos into other languages and those fan translations are 10000x better then auto-translated subtitles.
- I dunno if Kazuna AI (above) does her own subtitles... Its been forever since Ive watched a video from her, but there are certainly smaller channels with the same premise that do not.

Then of course there are actual educational videos that might have official Spanish, and French subtitles but fans usually create the subtitles for less common languages like Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Polish exc

[TempestCatto]

If you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best do it with a .50 BMG - once and done - instead of doing it with a damn BB gun like Google seems to be doing.

[coasterghost]

Running a small tourist themed channel, I’ve had videos Community translated Into varying languages. It’s honestly a nice feature, and one that will be really missed. 

[lewdicrous]

27 minutes ago, Caroline said:

They really want to kill the site huh

This is just the start, next they'll track down the highest paid creators and personally take them out. /s

 

Quote

As a result, the feature is rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month.

With the amount of content that's posted on YouTube, how much is 0.001% & 0.2%?

Quote

Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the community contributions feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions.

This I can believe; give the internet a tool and they'll do everything but use it for its intended purpose.

[Taf the Ghost]

15 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

If you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best do it with a .50 BMG - once and done - instead of doing it with a damn BB gun like Google seems to be doing.

YT is a weird place. It's been clear for a while that Google didn't want to buy them, but because of various investment networks were kind of pushed into it. Then, because it really took off, it became de facto "important" to all of the people you really don't want to control something they deem "important". Thus, the people actually in charge did something brilliant. They shoved all of the employees that they can't really fire (because they're related to someone important, normally) over there. It's basically the business version of the classroom for the problem children. Once you see it, most of what happens makes so much more sense.

 

Because, to YT, it's not possible to have Opt-In systems that can be managed more effectively. Their entire method of operation is "One Algo Must Fit It All", which is clearly the result of dealing with Management incapable of understanding anything beyond that. World-class Tech, Dumpster-class leadership.

[Zodiark1593]

32 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

If you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best do it with a .50 BMG - once and done - instead of doing it with a damn BB gun like Google seems to be doing.

Not quite a mere “shooting oneself in the foot”, but not quite “shooting oneself in the face” either. 

[Taf the Ghost]

@lewdicrous and even the stat would be misleading. .2% would be 1 in 500 hours watched. So about 2k hours per 1mil hours played. Considering it'll all be on "lagging"/non-trending content, I'd actually assume the functional rate for the type of content it's on is closer to the 5-10% range. It's a bit like comparing traffic on Wikipedia. There's multiple types and some features are, in total, very small but, in the area they apply, quite widely used.

 

Of course, YT isn't smart enough to make it Opt-In with maybe even a Subscriber-only option. Hey, look, 15 seconds and I solve 95% of your problem. 

 

I honestly don't know how high of a bill I would charge if YT came for consulting work. 30m Yacht money would have to be the starting point.

[Dabombinable]

I wonder if we're going to see a sudden increase of inaccurate auto generated CC - I do know that even on TV, things can be vastly inaccurate (watching German films is actually fascinating, because my Mum is able to pick apart bad translations and fairly often changed context).

[RigidBody2D]

As someone who have unilateral hearing loss, this will trouble me a lot. I relied heavily on subtitles to comprehend any conversation if there is any background noises in the video.

[IAmAndre]

I don't really see this as a problem considering the metrics that YouTube showed to explain the situation. This would be push creators to either upload high quality subtitles themselves or just rely on YouTube's auto captions. For those who don't know, auto captions also support auto translations but for some reason this is only available on the YouTube website. I've used it before and it's very decent for a tech review in a foreign language in my experience.

[atxcyclist]

1 hour ago, lewdicrous said:

This is just the start, next they'll track down the highest paid creators and personally take them out. /s

 

With the amount of content that's posted on YouTube, how much is 0.001% & 0.2%?

This I can believe; give the internet a tool and they'll do everything but use it for its intended purpose.

I end up watching a lot of foreign language content, and aside from a few grammatical/typographical errors I rarely see any issues with user-submitted subtitles. It's a shame this program is ending, even if there's an automated generation system, there's nuance and slang that isn't probably apparent to those translation systems.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

A lot of non-english content creator that rely on community added subs gonna be piss imo. 

Yeah, but muh Google translation "Ai" is what Google will be pushing for sure.

[mr moose]

I'm actually waiting for the announcement that they are going to can youtube altogether,  sack a few thousand people,  sell off some data centres and re invest in other services.

[Doobeedoo]

This was mentioned before, I thought they already did this. They kill feature by feature. Their livestream side, while they don't really work on it or care much, is a luck of it's own if Twitch screws it self or some streamer needs alternate. It's YT so. 

Now what is annoying is their bad UI especially on desktop. Which is funny that mobile at times sems more finished as far as UX goes. I literally need extensions for YT like playlist timer, autostop playlist play, these were there before. Their notifications are useless and broken. They're so late, so what's the point of them vs go to sub page. Only good for comments. Oh but wait, they ruined that too few times alreay, at times didn't allow you to properly reply. Would take you to video instead, not even anchor to comment. So much functionality they ruin or don't add. Not to mention Gmail. 

[thechinchinsong]

I'm both looking forward to and dreading the day YouTube fails under its own incompetence.

[Mihle]

Didn't YouTube have built in system to pay third party to do subs? Or do I remember wrong?

Maybe Youtube takes a cut there and want people to use that feature instead.

[CTR640]

To be perfectly honest, I am not surprised. That's the problem with such big corporations. They can do a lot of stupid and fucked up decisions and still won't care. People will just swallow it and deal with them and continue using it.

[rawrdaysgoby]

That is Stupid. Just leave it alone....

[Chett_Manly]

So basically because someone might say a naughty word they are removing it all together. 

 

Censor censor censor, cut cut cut, everything to appease political correctness. 

[RGProductions]

This is unfortunate. I have hearing damage and it isn't even that bad, but I still can't imagine not having captions, a lot of which are community captions. This might be the end of me using youtube as an entertainment platform, it will seriously suck.

[cj09beira]

On 8/1/2020 at 5:19 AM, Taf the Ghost said:

@lewdicrous and even the stat would be misleading. .2% would be 1 in 500 hours watched. So about 2k hours per 1mil hours played. Considering it'll all be on "lagging"/non-trending content, I'd actually assume the functional rate for the type of content it's on is closer to the 5-10% range. It's a bit like comparing traffic on Wikipedia. There's multiple types and some features are, in total, very small but, in the area they apply, quite widely used.

 

Of course, YT isn't smart enough to make it Opt-In with maybe even a Subscriber-only option. Hey, look, 15 seconds and I solve 95% of your problem. 

 

I honestly don't know how high of a bill I would charge if YT came for consulting work. 30m Yacht money would have to be the starting point.

charging a lot is smart but lets be real, a 14 year old could do a better job than they are doing.

On 8/1/2020 at 7:36 AM, mr moose said:

I'm actually waiting for the announcement that they are going to can youtube altogether,  sack a few thousand people,  sell off some data centres and re invest in other services.

at this point it would be the best move for people, and hopefully a better platform takes its place.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

charging a lot is smart but lets be real, a 14 year old could do a better job than they are doing.

at this point it would be the best move for people, and hopefully a better platform takes its place.

winmx

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Youtube has decided to kill off community provided captions, leaving just auto-generated captions. Ironically, during Deaf Awareness Week.

 

Media

 

Quotes

Quote

Today's the day YouTube is killing its "Community Contributions" feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. Announced...in July, which triggered a community outcry from the deaf, hard of hearing, and fans of foreign media. In one of Google's all-time, poor-timing decisions, YouTube is killing the feature just two days after the International Week of the Deaf. Once enabled..., the Community Contributions feature would let viewers caption or translate a video and submit it to the channel for approval. YouTube currently offers machine-transcribed subtitles that are often full of errors. YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. "While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators,"..."it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse." A petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. "Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience," the petition reads. Instead of the free, in-house solution YouTube already built and doesn't want to keep running, the company's shutdown post pushes users to paid, third-party alternatives. "YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."

 

My thoughts

Christ Google, that's some horrendous timing on your part. At the very least, Creators will still be able to able to subtitle their own content. Regardless, the auto generated subtitles are pretty garbage and having them auto-translated completely makes them incomprehensible. 

 

Sources

BBC
Youtube

Arstechnia (quote, media source)

The Verge