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
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.
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.
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.