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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a hearing disability, crowdsourced captions are a godsend for me, and I have never once seen spam or abuse in them.

Most videos I watch are on niche and technical topics and the auto generated captions do a remarkably poor job, so I will miss this feature very much. RIP.

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You can't overstate how useless auto generated captions are. I'm not an English native speaker, so I sometimes need captions for people with particularly strong accents, slang, or people talking quickly over each other. Those are precisely what automatic systems can't catch.

Your system can close caption clear sounds on a good quality recording over no background noise? awesome. That's exactly what I don't need it for.

> and I have never once seen spam or abuse in them.

That's because the spam is a problem the content creator has to deal with. According to the article, captions need to be approved by the creator before the public sees them, so you'd never know.

I'm a content creator (fast.ai), and have dozens of multi-hour long videos with community-provided translations and transcriptions. I have never seen any spam or abuse of any form.

Removal of this feature is going to impact our international students very badly. Access to technical education was already hard enough - now it'll require English fluency too.

The spam and abuse happens on very large channels where incentives change quite a lot. E.g. pewdiepie had to disable community contributions because of people sneaking in advertising or spam in the middle of legitimate looking subtitles.

I guess it also depends on your audience. It's no surprise to me that someone like pewdiepie attracts the sort of people who would do that.

The solution is to let individual creators turn the feature on and off, which they could already do, not nuke it for the whole site.

But as I suggested in another comment, surely other sites will provide the same crowd-sourced service, if there aren't already?

YouTube isn't removing existing subtitles or the ability to have subtitles. You'll just need to use a different platform for people to contribute them, no? And then the creator will still be able to add them to YouTube.

Ideally there won't be any negative impact on international students at all.

It still makes access harder, YouTube already had the feature built in but now you have to go to another site?

On the other hand, other sites are much more likely to build better features for the subtitling/captioning and building a community around it.

So I really do think this will be a net benefit in the long run.

I wonder if they couldn't have solved that in some technical manner too. For example have the autogen transcripts first by default, but allow the opportunity for community contributions to first curate the autogen transcripts and correct any devations where the autogen is wrong. So we start with preclassified speech and correct that small fraction of the time the autogen is mistaken. I figured they could have even used those delta transcripts to improve training on. Videos with huge error rates could flag the contribution for human review, and even with those ones that faithfully correct have some human review them quickly since it may be a word or two. I usually catch at least one discrepancy every video I watch with captions that's longer than say 10 minutes. More frequently on technical subject matter too.

I'm bored, and I might might take this up as an after-hours project (perhaps as a chrome extension). I'd appreciate if HN readers could answer these questions (it would save me a lot of time researching)

1. Can out-of-the-box VLC be an adequate replacement? It can play YouTube videos and it can also load & display .srt caption files (least work for me, but will hit channel's incomes)

2. Can browser extensions easily query the playback time on a YouTube video with sub-second accuracy?

3. Can a browser extension easily overlay text over a YouTube video? I'm thinking anti-clickjacking security might get in the way, but I'm not familiar with the current extensions security models.

3: I use the Substital extension which can overlay subtitles over a youtibe video (over most video players in fact).

I think the people behind the popular "Language Learning with Netflix" Chrome extension are already working on the YouTube version

https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/

This Chrome extension (Subtitles for YouTube) already can overlay custom subtitles on youtube. It will even automatically search external subtitle websites for the url of the video you're viewing and load subtitles for that video from those websites.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subtitles-for-yout...

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