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.
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”
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.
(Note: Ratios are poorly guessed based in my experience).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
(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.
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.