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Comment by reddalo | Hacker News Reader

Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).

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Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.

I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads

And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.

Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.

It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.

Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.

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