YouTube is now altering comments? [video] | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is now altering comments? [video]

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32 pointssleighboy17 comments

The author does not even bother to mention which video, which browser plugins he is using, or even what domain he is on. I am skeptical of these claims with no attempt to reproduce.

I would like to know if another browser would show the original comment or the altered one. Because the comment shows up and is then altered after the fact, I would blame a translation plugin on the client side.

I could see a poor-quality plugin being fooled by a different-language version of YouTube and auto translating.

He mentions the video, it's the latest Curious Droid video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZHONQAMV48&t=626s

I met the same problem when some videos had bizarre, translated titles. Nothing as weird as the OP, though.

This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8TS1Nnbc54

I see the title "Grandpa's Grub #2 in the Aude" in Firefox; but in Chromium the title is "LA POPOTE À PÉPÉ Épisode #2 Dans l'Aude à Saint-Gaudéric." which is probably right (all the videos in the series are French, in French and titled in French).

So there's definitely something weird going on, and it's breaking badly youtube. Google never was able to understand that I'm able to read several languages, thank you, and I don't want no stupid auto-translate, ever. Particularly when auto-translate randomly drops words (as in my video example).

I've never understood why youtube started autotranslating video titles (it's probably in an A/B test as it doesn't always happen). If I can't understand the video title, what's the point in translating it? I wouldn't understand the video either.

Yup, I've had this happen to me in Firefox as well. It's almost as if someone was doing an A/B test and didn't want to bother with putting thought into the selectors so they just said fuck it in Firefox we will do A and B in Chrome.

"Google never was able to understand that I'm able to read several languages, thank you, and I don't want no stupid auto-translate, ever."

Same problem on Ebay, and they have a much worse translator than Google, so that English product names get sometimes translated in funny totally unrelated words. I asked them if there's a way to turn off the translation and get only original English terms but alas no way.

Honestly I'd be more inclined to write this off as a bug with Polymer.js or something rather than jumping to a conclusion from the YouTube comments like "Say goodbye to free speech" -- It's much more plausible to be a technical issue than an attempt at controlling the contents of YouTube comments.

The guy says it was an amalgam of his previous comments he'd made that day and I'm sure if you have a channel of his size, you're likely to have YouTube open for quite a while, and since it's an SPA, you could get all sortsa concurrency bugs or whatever.

Probably a bug with the new DragonFly rollout.

I guess the main critique here would be the question of authenticity. How can you prove that it was actually youtube and not some homebrew lookalike site he cooked up?

With that said, I'd like to add the obvious "BIG if true"

> "BIG if true"

I 'm sorry, but even if true, who cares about youtube comments?

That it's YouTube is utterly irrelevant - if this is not an external factor (e.g. a clientside translation plugin, as suggested elsewhere) it sets a very dangerous, and likely illegal, precedent, even more notable from being a Google-owned site.

I strongly doubt that this is on YouTube's end, however - not because I trust Google not to alter comments if they believe it fits their interests, but rather because I believe they could do it in a more subtle manner (test backlash by only fixing typoes at first, for example, and probably hide major alterations from users).

could it be .. spez again

Easy to fake, and a sample size of 1...I think this requires more examples before being taken seriously.

I post YouTube comments frequently and I've never seen this.

I'd be inclined to think it's a bug in some extension he's using, or Chrome's automatic translation feature is doing something it shouldn't.

This title is misleading and should be changed. At least use the "YouTube is now ALTERING our comments?!" or something,,,

In what way is the title misleading?

Perhaps because it turned into a statement rather than a question? We've put the title closer back to the original. (Submitted title was "YouTube automatically modifying comments on submission".)

Is hacker news suddenly clickbait shitpost?

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