YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels
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I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs context to select but randomly thrown around, probably as a best effort from translators.
e.g. [“X had occurred”, “Please do X now”, “Use this to do X”, “Choose which you want for X”, “Do X for this event”]
Microsoft used to be great in this regard in 2000s but now feel like I’m back at when gcc was telling me “$DIRNAME am directory entering”
I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.
And who in the world would volunteer their labor for free to do said translations?
In your case, describing it as "a random static marketing website for a corporation" more or less shuts down the discussion.
In Google's case, while they probably don't see YT in those same terms, the convergence of the approach towards i18n suggests that maybe they're a little closer to it than they were.
Neither of these are the same as the YouTube situation, because in the YouTube situation you're dealing with user-contributed content being translated, which is a crucial difference. Community contributions were never about translating the YouTube UI (or god forbid privacy policy, ToS, etc.); they were only ever about users submitting translations of other users' content.
We're at a point where a lot of these tools haven't matured in their consumer implementations, but that's coming. It's just a matter of time.
That's all ignoring the soft accessibility of things like iPads that have made computing accessible to Grandma.
os epoh dluohs I.
I agree that we're progressing fast, but fully automated machine translation is IMHO still lightyears away (if at all feasible). And to automate subtitle generation in a foreign language, you first need to have speech to text, which is also still error-prone, so now you have two sources of errors.
We're seeing the uncanny valley problem: By now, things like machine translation are so good for simple use cases, that they're being aggressively pushed, and at first it may even appear correct / as if it was done by a human, but then suddenly the translation becomes nonsensical and weird. Even for the well-received deepl, it's still surprisingly easy to give it some text that it really struggles with.
Incidentally, I remember attending a lecture about 12 years ago by the then new professor of NLP who was talking about his success with using machine aided human translation of subtitles from Swedish into Norwegian. Granted, a lot may have improved in 12 years, but it still struck me as impressive that even in languages that closely related, the best they could hope for in a research project was machine aided translation.
Even with human-translated texts it's usually noticeable when the translator didn't understand the subject. To make sense of the translated text you then have to try to reverse-engineer the translator's mapping to figure out what the text would have said in the original.
Much like how you can't properly parse HTML using only regular expressions and string substitution, you can't truly translate human languages without understanding. You have to parse the input language, process the meaning of what was said and finally serialize to the target language.
Machine translation still works by a straightforward source-to-target mapping. This assumes that there is somehow a 1:1 correspondence between concepts in one language and concepts in the other one.
There are some cases where this can yield OK results: when the languages are very closely related and/or if the material is very technical (e.g. instruction manuals), because in such cases, the concepts do tend to align a bit better.
But in general, I think the problem is intractable without solving general AI.
Making good subtitles means you prioritize readability over accuracy. You have a limited amount of space for your text, and you want to keep a low characters per second, so you cut words, ruthlessly. But you have to choose which words to cut so that it still makes sense, which means that you have to identify filler words so you can cut them, or figure out ways to re-phrase something into a shorter sentence.
You probably also want to preserve the tone and style of the dialogue, which means you have to choose the right synonyms, not just the most common ones.
And if you're creating hearing-impaired subtitles, it becomes even more necessary to understand what's going on in the video. If someone slams a door center-screen, you can cut that from the subtitles if you have more important things to display, but if someone slams a door off-screen, you absolutely have to include it in the subtitles, because that's the kind of information a hearing-impaired person needs.
Good luck training your little machine-learning network how to identify which sound effects originate from objects on-screen and which originate off-screen...
There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the autotranslation feature or people have naturally migrated away from it...
in general, I feel that tech, maybe due to being so overwhelmingly from the US, has very poor support for things like multilingualism, which is in fact more common than not across the world (the US being an outlier traditionally - and even there, I think the influence of Spanish is growing).
For example:
- On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one
- It's impossible on Android to have different apps use different languages (unless the app itself allows for it), which would not only fix the issue mentioned above with the badly translated apps, but also be really helpful e.g. for language learners
- It took Google Maps years to add a feature where, if you start typing a street name and it suggests a street, it gives you the option of directly filling in the street number too (e.g., I'm typing "Foob" and it suggests "Foobarstraße, 11111 Berlin", but giving me the option to directly type the street number before the comma). My hypothesis for why this took so long to add is that people from the US were totally oblivious to the need for this feature, since in the US, the street number comes before the street name and people could just type "123 Foob" and get the suggestion for the full address
- There is simply no way in the Play Store (and I believe in the App Store it's similar?) to see reviews in another language than the one from your store. This makes no sense for me, for many apps there are very few if any German reviews, but I'd still like to see English ones. I think it's even worse for app developers, although maybe they have some separate way of seeing that? Amazon doesn't have that problem btw.
- Also, a pet peeve of mine: using country flags for languages. Yeah, nope.
and so on ...
Yes and no. The majority of my experience with localization is via WordPress. Frankly, it's a PITA. Another thing to know, and so on. It's not an extension so to speak, it's another mountain to climb, another silo to wrestle with.
Furthermore, and yes this is unique to WP, it make no effort to leverage it's scale. Certainly, once (e.g.) 'Add to Cart' has been translated and vetted, it doesn't need to be done again. You should be able to submit your language file, have it parsed and spit back fleshed out as much as possible. Then you need only to focus on the bits that didn't find a match.
Yes. Some increase in understanding is in order. But an updating and upgrading of the tool(s) is over due as well.
Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having different plural forms (so you might need to translate "users" differently depending on if you're talking about 2 users or 3 users).
This is not rocket science. We know how to do it. It's just that most businesses don't give a shit. English gets you far enough in terms of adoption in most markets that you don't really have to care about l10n unless you have to fulfil legal requirements. (Also, some markets have bad rates of English literacy, e.g. China, but those are usually served by local app providers.)
> On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one
Where I live (Germany), this has gotten way better over the years. Around ten years ago, cinema chains started offering screenings in original language (i.e. English) for the more popular movies. And cable TV started showing shows undubbed as well. The first thing I can remember there was Game of Thrones airing undubbed on the same day as the US release. I think the major reason was that piracy sites allowed users to access undubbed content easily. If you have the choice of watching the new GoT episode right now or waiting a year for the dub, most people are going to go with piracy. TV/cinema execs saw this and realized that there was a market to tap into.
Having access to undubbed content was actually quite eye-opening to me. Having only had contact with dubs up until that point, I only then realized how eye-wateringly shitty German dubs are. It appears to me like German dubbers don't really consider themselves voice actors (emphasis on the "actor" part). Sometimes it's like they think they're reading a newscast when it's actually an action scene.
> tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation
you're using "understood" when it should actually be "cared about" which is substantially different. Also,
> the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users
I'm part of the tech industry and at the same time a non-English speaker and multilingual users, and I'm not oblivious to my own needs. The problem is not that tech people don't understand, it's that business decisions don't take multilingual users into account.
This differentiation is important. Rephrased like this, it becomes apparent that this is a matter of policy, not literacy. It becomes possible to imagine (though I'm not arguing this) a scenario in which apps with a sufficient number of users could be required by law to accommodate multilingual users.
English to danish translations are universally awful. Barely comprehensible gibberish(¤). So I use English operating systems with locale set to en_DK, so dates display as D-M-Y like God intended, but a surprisingly large amount of software somehow thinks it knows better, and displays its UI in danish anyway, so I get to have a brain aneurysm while trying to parse their danish translation for "anisotropic filtering".
(¤) Pre-emptive snarky comment: "Exactly like spoken danish, LOL".
Also you get tremendously worse translations when you translate a document (pdf, doc) vs the "scan/import" an image of text function.
It's a real bummer because hypertext and mobile UI should be excellent mediums for presenting multiple candidate translations and letting the reader indicate the best translation.
(Note: Ratios are poorly guessed based in my experience).
Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.
> Clearly more options exist for managing spam
Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just ...” without realising that the approach would have poor precision/recall at scale. Any hard coded rule would probably rot. Building a classifier to detect this abuse would be tricky considering it’s low prevalence and that ML was doing a poor job of captioning in the first place (nothing to compare it to).
Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?
Apart from the last statement "Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether." the person you replied you was obviously stating their opinions, and not claiming them to be facts.
> "an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me"
> I don't think this functionality was as little-used
Emphasis mine, in both cases.
As for the final statement, which is presented as fact, I think it probably is factually accurate that there are more possible options for YouTube than shutting the feature down.
If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views.
I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.
> I'm subscribed to about 100 channels
How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles? Note that even if you used subtitles, those could have been auto-generated.
I suspect the answer to this question is entirely dependent on whether you speak English. If you don't speak English (and the person you're responding to obviously does), then you're reliant on subtitles regardless of source, unless you only stick to videos in your native language.
Almost never, since all the content I consume is in English. But several channels made posts about that upcoming change and there was quite some feedback by people depending on this (as far as I could tell, especially the Spanish speaking community).
> In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.
By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too, since the number of viewers actually relying on them is a minority, and maintaining it probably takes some effort too.
I think community generated subtitles, just like regular subtitles on TV, enable people to access information (or entertainment) they otherwise couldn't. There should be a better measure for its value than just how much effort it takes to maintain that functionality vs the number of users, otherwise there would be little reason for any kind of barrier-free technology or efforts really.
> By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too,
You made an implicit assumptions that TV subtitles and Youtube community contributed subtitles are used by the same proportion of people. That's almost certainly wrong. And remember, Youtube auto generated subtitles still exist for all videos.
Look I don't work for Google, but it pains me when I see a thread full of people shitting on them without any basis in fact.
Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.
You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto-generated subtitles like this is something trivial that just works. Compared to everything else that is required to run a platform like YouTube, community generated subtitles pale in comparison.
> Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.
Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind? Never did the quality of a product suffer because corners were cut in order to save a few cents during production. Trusting a company like Google. A radical idea indeed.
Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who. Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.
I'd ask you to reconsider this approach but tbh, this is the easiest way to farm upvotes on HN. So you do you.
> Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind
I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little.
As someone working in the field it's at least possible to make an educated guess about such things.
> Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.
No. You are primarily coming up with phrases like this, like "typical for HN" above to make it sound like everyone complaining is a pleb with no clue and you are far superior. You then go on to claim the reason people do this is to "farm upvotes" as a blanket invalidation, instead of contributing anything of substance.
> I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little
I initially criticized that you suggested going by share of users when judging the usefulness of this feature, by comparing it to CC on TV and similar technologies. I tried reasoning why I believe this is an important and valuable feature that should not be removed. Only in my third comment did I mention that I can't imagine that it takes too much work to maintain this feature. But you immediately jumped at it, screaming THIS!! and continued your arrogant ramble about stupid HNers. The only one in this whole comment thread coming across as authoritative is you.
> I'd ask you to reconsider this approach [...] So you do you.
Sometimes it's best to follow your own advice.
Over and out.
By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.
You have to make hard choices sometimes. If this is a feature that only a tiny minority cares about, then the team has to pull the plug on it.
Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.
If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.
At least the garbage is pretty consistent, so I can pause the videa and tell my wife that the phrase X Y Z in the subtitles is actually A B. (The number of syllables is almost always correct, but often the number of words is not.)
On a side note, it's not YouTube, and it's translation instead of strait subtitling, but I've seen some pretty bad English subtitles for Netflix's La Casa de Papel (Money Heist). I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I do remember a few times the translations were very odd and I realized the translator was translating a person's surname from Spanish into its English meaning, and not capitalizing it. It would have been just fine leaving the name untranslated, as my wife and I could both clearly make out the names of the characters. I presume a human translator would know not to translate names. I hope the subtitles I saw were third-party subtitles where someone ran Spanish subtitles through Google Translate.
Auto closed captions quality depend on the language and the locutor. It works well for "presentation" content like vlogs and news, it fails for casual discussion or songs.
For the vast majority of people on this planet, English is not their first language (if they speak it al all), and their command of English may often not be good enough to comfortably understand all of the content they might want to enjoy. And it's still the case that most content on such platforms, and certainly often the most viral one, is in English.
And even beyond that, people sometimes learn other languages, in which case watching something in the target language with subtitles can be a very helpful step.
I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it.
That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand what's important.
Because the most important part for getting good subtitles is to get the timing right, to make sure every subtitle is displayed for the minimum time needed, and to make sure you split the dialogue in the right places, so that reading them "flows", so that they match what's being said. And you want to tie them to scene changes, to keyframes, so you don't get weird blinking, and for that you need the ability to step through the video frame by frame and adjust the subtitles.
But the YT subtitling tools emphasized the text, and translations of the text. It was easy to suggest changes to a piece of text and get that through the "community" process, but changes to the timing was super-hard to do in their tools, and really hard to get through. You can upload a .srt that you've created in a real subtitling program, but that completely overwrites the existing subtitles, and was impossible to "diff" with what was already there, so that shit gets rejected as a rule, because reviewers don't understand the changes.
So the result is that whoever manages to make the first community translation that is accepted, that person's timing is then taken as canon by everyone else, and all other translations are based on those exact timing, never mind if they're good, never mind if they're a good fit for every language, never mind if someone else can do better timings.
And that completely sucks the joy out of the process, because you can't really improve existing subtitles, you can only try to change a word here and there.
I have a friend that translates everything from English for his grandmother, so she can watch movies that she does not understand, but he does it by hand in a video editing program. Would love to help him out.
.srt is the lowest common denominator for subtitle files, every subtitling program can import and export those. It's a pretty dumb format though, my biggest issue with it is that it doesn't have support for fixed-position left-aligned subtitles, and it doesn't have support for specifying the font. I understand why, it's to make playback much simpler and resolution-independent, which is why every single video player program or hardware device in existence has support for it.
But if you left-align it with a fixed margin, choose a good font, and use white text on black background, your subtitles are going to be so much easier to read.
(Here's a sample of what I prefer: https://skamenglishsubs.tumblr.com/post/188037245260/subtext...)
(I belong to the tiny minority of people who often mix up the words for left and right, it's both annoying and hilarious.)
It's not the same effort for my brain to keep up listening to spanish, english, french or portuguese. And I WANT TO KNOW what I'm getting into. If I want subtitles or translations I'll activate it myself, thanks.
Sometimes I browse for a topic and I need a native POV out of it, but it became so difficult because YT just treats you like if you were stupid so yo loose time going back and forth.
IDK, maybe there was some option to manage it, but it was very well hidden in menus that I couldn't find it.
If you go to Francais avec Pierres youtube channel for example, where they post videos covering various things about the French language, you can find translations in a number of langs, it’s a worthwhile exercise to compare community translations with automated translations— there is just no comparison. Why why why must you do this google
Probably because the people doing them are learning the language themselves, rather than fluent in it. And even advanced learners makes tons of mistakes.
It's one thing if a news article is sloppily translated but you can get the gist. It's a whole other thing when content is being used for learning and so you're actively learning wrong things.
There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile and hop from one project to the next, and so the knowledge and desire to maintain something goes away with it.
There was no way to have those numbers until the feature existed, so of course it got built. But once it got deployed, oh well... The public didn't use it in a way that makes sense to maintain.
But from Googles beep boop robot analytics perspective they just see that nobody is using the feature and assume it's because nobody wants it.
Does Google talk to anyone outside of their engineering bro culture?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YL0xoSmyZI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW1yYUqBm8
Edit: added Steve Krug video.
Yeah, people are justifiably upset that they dropped this feature. But they are also, to my knowledge, the online video source that ever offered a feature like this in the first place. So nobody's upset is realistically going to translate into an exodus to a competitor, and the effect on their bottom line is negligible, and they have zero reason to care.
You know how the last 3 hours of any game of Monopoly is just this long, shitty, inhuman slog that isn't fun for anyone, except perhaps the person who lucked into owning all the properties? We've made it to that phase of the game.
The engineers that Google hires to keep them from working for competitors are used to build as many new products and features as possible. Abandoned products are assets in Google's IP portfolio and continue to protect them against competing products and features long after Google has closed the door.
It is however I believe good at keeping engineers happy, and good and good at managing their engineer infrastructure (though it is very Google-specific, and not necessarily a good fit for the rest of the world). But that doesn't say that engineers are being managed cleverly or efficiently.
The scale of YouTube has counterintuitive implications.
The harassment, deceptive self-promotion and trolling misuse of this feature was at such a scale that this feature was doing real harm that wasn’t effectively contained.
This is an issue Youtube has struggled with for years.
So, a feature that causes real harm, and brings real good, and at length they found no solution to the harm: the feature is quite reasonably axed.
And people who rely on the good faith usage of that abusable feature are justifiably disappointed...but we know why they did it.
For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family name, and Stoffe is the first thing on their sign.
Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...
I suspect the suggestion/front page algorithm has a new branch, suggesting a small number of interesting-to-you foreign language videos with translated titles and adjusting from there.
On Bing this is somehow even worse, if you do a video search and you have the location setting wrong it just flatout doesn't show 90% of the reuslts for some queries.
Often, the translation suck as well and doesn't make sense. Especially on youtube. I had to change my country of origin to make it disappear. Like, what's the point in translating a youtube video title if the video itself still is in english?
Or translating movie titles, which creates enormous confusion imo since it's not named a swedish name, it's often in english.
Every feature they remove, they do because it is a burden on feature velocity or maintenance. Fine, but why are they so bad at weighing it against long term trust? At this point, I expect the search box to search, Gmail to send emails, YouTube to host videos, maps to do navigation, and docs to edit docs. One core feature per platform, all other features will probably be dropped sooner or later.
It's a bad look, Google.
If only Google had a half a trillion dollars to spend on something other that spying on people. And if only there were 35 million people out of work.
But, alas, poor sweet simple Google cannot possibly lie in the bed it made.
We have seen this scenario play out in censorship standards, various authorities, and so on over the decades. It never works as intended.
Yes, because that's literally what the parent posited in his scenario:
"Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone"
I would take the bed away too.
Uber has massive revenues as do many other capital intensive businesses. That doesn't make them profitable.
The parent to your comment chose revenue likely to note that Google makes money from the bed ie. it's not a service given away for free.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...
Alphabet said YouTube ad revenue in the first quarter reached $4.7 billion, while cloud sales came in at $2.6 billion. The company broke those numbers out for the first time, but it’s still not disclosing profit figures for the units.
Given how quickly and easily the axe comes down on sub par Google products, I highly doubt they'd keep YouTube if it wasn't profitable.
For one year. And people will complain that US$15,000 is not enough to live on.
What happens in year two?
That's not likely, is it?
Does Google have no concept of how YouTube drives ad sales and other synergies? Or of how much goodwill is worth?
Remove the gamification and few would care that moderation lags.
The platforms try to mitigate virality with automated moderation. Anything to preserve that ad revenue.
The only societal fix is to slow down or break the engagement feedback loops. Something the platforms won't do voluntarily.
Whether it be Reddit or Facebook to YouTube, people are demanding security and greater tech company control over features.
I don't need captions that often but if I do not then half of them are community provided in my experience.
This is (unintentionally) again hitting against videos with useful content, compared to this endless slew of pointless (and often content wise incorrect) click bait videos.
I want to remind the loss aversion and status quo bias. We tend to evaluate losses more important than they are, which is why for example it is hard to throw seldom used things away.
That said, why should feature removal mean automatic loss of trust? Because this feature is not important to me personally, it actually increases my trust that they can reorient their focus instead of churning man-hours on a feature just because it existed. Now I get it, it was an important feature for some people, and next day they might remove a feature that I find important, but in aggregate they clearly weighed its usage/perceived importance against removal decision.
I don't really care about this particular feature, but I do care about the trend. Why should a feature be sunset? It seems like this must be because of (a) bugs/maintenance burden or (b) a poor design or one that is mismatched with the current product direction. The fact that Google sunsets so many features and products suggests that both of these happen with high frequency. (b) is especially worrying, why can't they spend time before launching to figure out what they're going to do and commit to it? They aren't a small startup, they've got tons of resources. I'm sure they're trying, but whatever they're doing is not working, in my opinion.
For the record, I'm not a Google hater, but this is just so frustrating to watch as a user.
I imagine this picture; a “tech-smith” is building an elaborate, complicated machinery and we as the users are watching it, clapping to it, interacting with it. Some are asking “this machine should have bells”, some go “it should have whistles”, and the techsmith wants to add and remove those based on those parameters. In reality, no one knows what the final machine should look like and no one knows how exactly they will use it. So there is a sweet spot in which unexpected changes are budgeted for so that it can change to conform better to what we want and what we find useful as we gain experience with the machine. Which means sometimes the techsmith will need to go “you know what, I’m going to take this bell away because not many are using it and it is causing me problems, and instead I’ll use the materials and energy to add these extra wheels” even after having invested a lot to that bell initially (which is laudible, because they are also fighting against their own sunken cost fallacy).
This should be familiar to software engineers; “why the requirements were not perfect before I started writing the software” doesn’t work well in real life. In reality as the engineer and the user gain more experience with the system that is gradually emerging, they acquire new participatory knowledge of that system and that causes a change in requirements, in a dynamical, reciprocal fashion. (Which is one of the reasons why waterfall processes are not as popular today for most products). I think the same goes at a higher scale, if not complexity, for these comnplicated machinery big tech builds that is used by billions of people.
I think "high feature churn" will become a part of Google's brand.
There are also a petition about this: https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove-community-c... But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube's decision.
Can I run a background task on my machine to help in some way with making the content of some instance more available to people, or would I have to run my own instance?
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...
They are, but if you aren't interested in that content, why would you be interested in joining communities where that is the focus?
look at gab and voat
But even so: Incomplete subs are better than AI generated subs.
AI generated subs are better than no subs. So I switch to AI subs when neccessary. This shows that incomplete subs are welcome to me!
I hope that Youtube reconsiders their decision.
If they really think their NN is good enough to replace community contributed captions, I have yet to see evidence of this, and there’s no evidence in the announcement that this is a vote of confidence in their tech. If anything, it’s a vote against their ability to manage spam and abuse, they just don’t want to deal with it anymore.
It’s not like companies like Google have never had technical regressions either. Their core service, Google Search, is less useful to me than it was 10 years ago.
but the tl;dr amounts to just because a company has the technology does not mean it is broadly applied across all of its services where it would be most useful. That said, if YouTube ever implements automated CC that works I’ll happily scarf down that humble pie.
(I don't use YouTube, but this applies just as well to television.)
https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/40227-l...
Seriously? Without the subtitles from fans, I can't really count how many great content I will miss, especially for relative niche languages.
I'd rather turn myself to twitch or netflix to fulfill most of my youtube needs.
And as you say, they won't spun it off, it justs teaches too much about us and is the perfect ad delivery platform for them :s.
I still believe Google has a LARGE interest in owning it though. Obviously. It's simply maybe not good enough in itself
Having said that, I agree that Google should know better. They base their entire strategy on pure data, but I fear that in this way they are forgetting to factor in things that are not (yet) measurable or measured.
If you have contributions currently saved as drafts, these will be available for the next 60 days (until Sept 28 2020), and you have until then to publish them before they’re removed. Any already published contributions (titles, descriptions, captions, etc) will continue to show up on videos and can be managed by Creators in YouTube Studio.HN is literally the only public forum I use, and only because it's small enough and obscure enough that most of the trolls stay away, and a couple moderators can keep it usable.
Yahoo removed comments, ridding the world of one of the larger cesspools. Reddit's entire raison d'être is to serve as a fetid pool of the worst the Internet has to offer.
We can't have nice things because we don't deserve nice things.
"Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title/descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we’re removing them to focus on other creator tools."
With this rationale all wikis must close down. But no, they don't. They started to fight spam technically. And if I remember Google was also pretty good in this spamfighting niche, with Gmail, decades ago. Nowadays with YouTube and News shutting down apparently not anymore. Those Google PMs really made a name of themselves as worlds worst.
My guess is YouTube wants to take a step towards broadcasting online instead of community videos.
I wonder how they would explain this.
Oh so they realized it's free labour and whant the users to train their speech recognition AI.