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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

Except it's not. they aren't getting rid of captions and they are offering support

> YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions, YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."

That arguably points out 2 things. (1) they aren't abandoning disabled people and (2) they're probably not lying about the feature not being used since if it was being used this offer would cost $$$$$$$$$

It sounds like nothing really changed. You can still contribute subtitles to a channel, one of the few that actually uses them, and the channel creator can still attach them to videos. All that changed is the interface to edit is no longer in youtube. Choose any of 1000s other ways, send the creator your subtitles, creator can attach them to video.

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But a 6 month limited subscription means that only profit yielding creators will be able to benefit, if at all.

And that means youtube is entrenching creators into their homemade economy even deeper. Already it's a fantastic phenomenon that people have created careers out of youtube.

But they are 100% dependent on Youtube.

Creating a new expenditure for them to have subtitles will only make it more exclusive and make them even more dependent on their youtube salary.

Small independent creators will have no chance to compete.

The support is time limited & it still prevents people from the community willing to help from doing so.

It does no such thing. People can help all they want. They just don't do it in an interface that Google provides. Instead they edit subtitles and send them to the channel's owner. The owner applies them, in the youtube interface, to their video.

Given the effort of making captions is actually the work of writing the captions themselves the effort went from several hours of work to the same several hours of work +1 minute. Literally nothing of importance changed. And that +1 minute assumes Youtube's UX was best in class because of it wasn't then moving to a better UX could save more time.

The level of animosity toward anything Google does is absurd. If there was a captioning service making money and Google added captions they'd get shade for ruining a market. Now they are removing an arguably rarely used UI but still leaving the feature (captions) completely available. There's literally no harm. The people actually motivated to write captions will barely notice the change. They'll still write them. All they have to do is send them to the channel creator. If the channel creator doesn't want them nothing has changed. They had to approve them before, they have to approve them now except click 1-2 buttons to upload them. Sheesh

Not sure what you're really getting at here. There are so many people who do the (yes, tedious) work of captioning videos from people they appreciate because there was a button right there. Some of those people may go on to find a third party caption editing package, and try to contact the content creator and coach them through uploading the subtitles... But isn't it obvious that this is going to reduce the aggregate quality of captions on YouTube?

The process before was straightforward: a community member would author captions and submit them to the producer, the producer would choose whether to approve them right there on YouTube's site; the new workflow involves email, forms, files, and community members who are motivated to go out of their way to figure out how to create and communicate YouTube-compatible captions that will now be less likely to be published even if they are high quality.

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