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Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

Its about time. The Youtube UI has become a disaster over the last few years. It all started with the ability to let uploaders "annotate" their videos. I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

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Agreed, but this move seems like a grab at Patreon and self promotion in general. Users can still put obnoxious annotations up.

> Users can still put obnoxious annotations up.

No, annotations are deprecated, you can't add them to videos anymore. [0]

[0]: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/03/keep-fans-en...

Wow, that is utterly disgusting and an attack on their own user base.

Huh, so, how will uploaders update corrections and other additions after the fact?

You can add "cards", i.e. the popups in the top right that show a short text and an "i" button. Those can be links to videos, polls, or external links (if you're a big youtuber). However the text is limited, you can't set how long it shows, and you can have a maximum of 5. You can maybe use subtitles too, but you cannot set a default subtitle for your video.

So there are hacky half-working workarounds, but otherwise youtube just told everyone who cares about their videos to go and kindly get fucked.

Well, how about reuploading if you fuck up the editing process, and trying not to fuck up the next time?

Then YouTube dumps all of your views and upvotes for that video. Annotations were the way around not being able to edit in place.

Who said anything about editing errors? I am talking about things like exploratory engineering videos, where the creator is speculating about certain things that get apparent only after the video has been uploaded, sometimes with the help of viewers.

It is for example not uncommon in teardown, some done by leading engineers in their entire field, to find out what some proprietarily marked chip is a few days after the fact. This is not a “fuck up”.

Reediting and reuploading a video just to change a single (but possibly important) detail is not only a colossal waste of time and effort that could be better spent on other videos, as far as I know it will also present itself as a new video.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever.

Seriously, good riddance. It added so much clutter to videos that I explicitly hid them any chance I got. I'd rather content creators just use the video description to communicate or edit their videos so that annotations would not be necessary.

So you read the entire description of a video before watching it and remember every word of it, including timestamps with comments to note corrections, even when there's 10 of them for a half hour video?

Annotations (in the sense of small snippets of text that display briefly to add info) are fine. What YouTube had in many cases was a poorly implemented MySpace page overlaid on the video. And as one of the parent posters said, the setting just kept turning itself back on no matter how many times you turned it off (on the video, or in your settings page).

"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video.

In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too.

And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with their youtube videos providing corrections and such via the description is entirely untenable.

I'm sorry you've only seen spam, but cutting off another's tool because some people can't use it correctly is a severe case of FYGM.

I don't know why you got downvoted so much, I share the same experience.

I expect it's a side effect from casual youtube users who've mostly experienced abuse of the feature and think i'm lying.

I don't really have a "set of youtubers" that I follow and so most of the stuff I watch is from random sources. I think you're right that it depends hugely on who you're watching - random hobby / extreme sports videos seem to be particularly bad, but technical and engineering videos are usually fine.

I don't think they should take it away completely, just limit it so avoid the aforementioned 'myspace page' overuse.

If only there was a way to actually edit a video.

I promote my developer courses on Youtube with external links and this doesn't really change anything.

It just means anyone in this position has to join the partnership program, but they can continue to NOT show ads on their channel (I don't like ads, so I don't show them on my channel).

10,000 views is honestly not a lot. If you follow any reasonable Youtube strategy for creating content, you'll reach that in no time. It's a minor inconvenience at best.

It does worry me tho, because in the future they may do other things to deter third party links.

> I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

It could be different now, but the last time I tried to answer this the answer was that preference is stored in a cookie and not globally. I have my browser set to dump cookies when it closes so I kept losing that setting.

The answer to excess of marketing is censorship of the small accounts? This does not make any sense.

It's not just small accounts. It's also big accounts that are abusive.

It seems like a better approach would be to just get rid of those annotations. I don't know how anyone ever thought that was a good idea.

But YT should let them link externally. Site's like Patreon are beneficial to everyone involved.

I've been watching tutorial videos on software packages recently, and one really nice use case for annotations is that if there is out of date information in a specific sentence, they can just annotate it with the newer info instead of redoing the entire video.

It's also helpful when they use the links as intended, like the video links to its own follow up video at the end.

Yea, this is the case with almost every channel I watch. I've found annotations and links to be used responsibly and to usually be helpful.

I can totally see how these features could be abused by some channels, though.

I can echo what the others have already commented, which is that in the overwhelming majority of videos from channels that I have subscribed to, the annotations have been useful.

Getting rid of them entirely would get rid of an easy and much needed way for the uploader to add corrections and other additions after the fact.

I do see videos where the annotations are rather annoying, but I don't think it's so often that it has been a terrible problem overall, and I have a suspicion that on those videos the annotations have not been the only annoying aspect.

Edit: I just saw further down that annotations are actually deprecated, and now I really wonder how people can add corrections to videos? Does that mean I have to read the description of every video I watch?

How to add corrections to post? Well, reply to your own video with a blank post so its top post and reserved. Edit it to add corrections.

I just regard annotations and commercials (which aren't blocked by uBlock Origin) as part of a video. If you (or I) don't enjoy a video (for whatever reason), stopping watching it is always an option to consider.

I've never been able to get the disable annotations option to stick. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's been that way for years. Very annoying.

I don't think it's persistent if you don't log in. There is an account-level setting (not a video-level setting) which I the gp is talking about.

Also the ability to illustrate a video with an image that's not part of the video, has become a click bait paradise.

Unlike the additions, I really don't see how that feature is benefiting the platform except for some uploaders by, as you succinctly put it, providing click bait.

I really wish the video image would have to be a frame taken from the video. Make it any frame, if the uploader cares so much they can include the image as a title card and pick a frame from that.

Before the option to put a custom image existed, assholes would put the click-bait image for a few frames in the middle of the video. You can't win with such idiots.

Nice that they are getting rid of an irritating implementation.

But they aren't replacing the legitimate need. Some videos do benefit from background material. Or a patreon type link to support the content creator.

Google should address the need. Otherwise it just looks like a tactic to keep people on YouTube.

install ImprovedTube Plus, turn off annotations in the extension, problem solved

Do you have an adblocker? It makes it very easy to block anotations and all other kinds of annoying crap.

There's a (fake) setting to globally disable annotations? Even if it doesn't work as Google describes it, I'm interested.

There's been one in the playback settings for years. https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

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