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Comment by stencil25 | Hacker News Reader

Video Annotations were frequently used to update mistakes made within a video, such as when the producer simply got a date or statistic incorrect, as well as for providing a future citation or update regarding the content of the video.

I think it would be nice to see a middleground feature, to facilitate these cases, whilst not being as easy to abuse as video annotations were.

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They could use the video description.

I'm going to take this number out of my ass but I'd say that only 1% of the people that watch a video will go read the full description unless there is a specific resource they are looking for(usually links)

You're probably not too far off in that assessment. I find myself going to the description only if the video says there are links to follow in it, or if I really like the music and I want to see if they are credited (which is how I discovered the band Foreign Fields, watching the John Neeman Tools blacksmithing videos).

Watching YT videos on Xbox or Chromecast makes looking at the descriptions impossible

You also can't view annotations on Xbox or Chromecast.

I either watch YouTube videos using the app on my phone or on my TV using my NVIDIA Shield. I don't see descriptions either way (or annotations, for that matter).

On the phone app, the description is dynamically loaded below the comments. I'm sure there's a less discoverable location, but I'd be hard pressed to identify it.

we will need a firefox extension that reads the description and overlays the annotations on the video at the appropriate time. otherwise it's impossible to do that for any serious video

Annotations are a quick and dirty fix that isn't really a fix at all.

It's really confusing if the voice in the video says one thing, and an annotation is displayed that says "this is not actually correct ..."

It would be much better if the video creator spent five minutes to actually fix the video and reupload it.

That would reset the views and comments.

Then you loose/cut off all previous comments/views/likes

They would have to upload it to a new URL and so none of the links to the old video would see it anyway, which is kind of useless.

Creators are strongly disincentivised from doing that since deleting the old version would throw away their views etc for that video. It would also delete comments, and while this is often no great loss, I do run across useful or interesting YouTube comments sometimes.

They don't need to delete the old version, they can link between new/old version in the description.

This still fragments your audience.

That sounds like a solution I'd personally never even notice. Most of the devices I consume youtube videos on either do not show the video description at all (TV) or actively disencourage reading it (the official Android app currently requires one or two clicks to even see it).

In addition to that, re-uploads are annoying enough as is because content creators constantly need to upload old content due to changes in Youtubes policies or enforcement. New revisions for any minor mistake instead of an overlay would properly ruin the subscription page imho.

This would be far more confusing than an annotation.

Aside from the other comments (which are all relevant), it's often not 'five minutes' to make a change like that - some of my (fairly simple) videos take longer than that just to render, aside from actually making the edit in the first place. Annotations offered a quick, easy and universal way to put on screen corrections in place,without loads of work and without losing view count, comments or fragmentation. That's no longer available.

so google prefers to throw that content away? that is entirely disrespectful of their content creators. I bet a massive number of youtubers can no longer edit their videos because they no longer have them.

> It's really confusing if the voice in the video says one thing, and an annotation is displayed that says "this is not actually correct ..."

I think you would have to try quite hard to be confused about something like this. Also, frequently used for self deprecation comedy.

I always found this satisfying in a strange way, especially on technical videos. Perhaps it raises my confidence even more on a video if time is taken to correct a statement inline with the time it is being said.

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