YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

community-contributed subtitles are an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me, particularly with non-English videos from small operations who may not have the resources to provide quality transcriptions/translations. I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether.

What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels.<p>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

Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I <i>don&#x27;t</i> want when I’m driving along, looking for their sign. There’s enough “Denglish” (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers.<p>For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family name, and Stoffe is the first thing on their sign.

Google just wants to eliminate any remaining trust users have in them, don&#x27;t they?<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s a bad look, Google.

IMO, subtitles from community contributions are a good way for me to enjoy foreign YouTube contents. Removing that is a bad news for people like me.<p>There are also a petition about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;google-inc-don-t-remove-community-captions-from-youtube" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;google-inc-don-t-remove-community-c...</a> But I doubt that it would reverse YouTube&#x27;s decision.

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I am Deaf. Community-added subs are wonderful and a lot better than AI generated subs. However many of them suddenly stop a few minutes into the movie. It looks like subtitling was too much work and got abandoned.<p>But even so: Incomplete subs are better than AI generated subs.<p>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!<p>I hope that Youtube reconsiders their decision.

Seems like they have enough resources to train their translation NN and speech-to-text NN. I don&#x27;t think google has introduced those features for the users in the first place but they were a means to get training data.

I have always wanted to edit the auto-generated subtitles and translations for some YouTube videos but never knew how. Perhaps the feature could be much more popular and really boost reach of some videos if they made it more visible and easy to use.

Ugh I follow a dutch guy (Master Milo) if he doesn&#x27;t do the subs then one of his followers will. When watching on a tv or phone I rely on these subtitles as there is no option to auto translate the auto generated subtitles. This will be bad for him as it will no doubt have an affect on his viewing numbers and his revenue.

It is too bad that the automated speech to text isn’t good enough to allow them to turn this feature off without losing a great deal of high quality subtitling.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amara.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amara.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a> is an alternative service, but probably even less discoverable for most viewers.

&gt; This feature was rarely used<p>Seriously? Without the subtitles from fans, I can&#x27;t really count how many great content I will miss, especially for relative niche languages.

I can totally see this abused for channels &#x2F; topics with toxic communities. Personally, I&#x27;ve only seen this work largely as intended. Overall, it&#x27;s a net loss, I don&#x27;t really see many communities replacing this feature by coordinating with the creator. Frequently, videos I watch doesn&#x27;t even get automated transcription feature - there&#x27;s a lot of good foreign content out there.

Between that and the ads becoming completely obtrusive, cutting my video at random moments, I really wish there was another alternative. I don&#x27;t have TV for years any more, and Youtube has become the new TV.

Somehow this minor feature stands as proof for me that Google doesn’t know its customers and doesn’t care. And yet they will be financially successful. Maybe they are too big.

Is it me or does it seem like a lot less content is getting autogenerated English captions? Maybe the backlog is growing, but I&#x27;ve been used to all new content being captioned, but am surprised when new uploads aren&#x27;t captioned.

No, they are removing the ability to create them. The existing contributions will remain.

Rather ironic that Google is having a problem with spam.

The old school technique was youtube-dl coupled with a separate search for subs.

RIP Kizuna AI community subbed videos

YouTube marked a huge shift on the internet. But of course all good things come to an end. It was an incredible free service that I loved and still love so much. Not to say it&#x27;s going away but ye I do notice cracks in the facade .. it&#x27;s no longer the new thing or even the current moment it is showing its age

I&#x27;m partly happy and sad at the same time. 90% of the people in the Netherlands speek english and go to universities that are also fully english. When you suddenly see your favorite content with strange dutch translations it makes it worse (for me atleast) I would just have hoped that they would allow individual users to disable the community changes. When translating things there where always a lot of personal touches or words that where on purpose translated to something more funny in the other language. I always had the feeling there really was a person typing those translations. I understand why google would like to automate this. I just hoped that they would allow users to specify if they want to keep the personal translation the automated translation or nothing at al or a mix for example a option to never translate titles.

Yet another cool feature lost to the fact that the YouTube &quot;community&quot; is a toxic swamp.

And now just imagine Google managing Wikipedia.<p>&quot;Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title&#x2F;descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam&#x2F;abuse so we’re removing them to focus on other creator tools.&quot;<p>With this rationale all wikis must close down. But no, they don&#x27;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.

People have been &quot;contributing&quot; legit looking subtitles and then inserting some spam in the middle for self promotion. Most big youtube channels e.g. pewdiepie has disabled community contributed subtitles.

This looks like a great opportunity for a new startup. There have been past annotation features disabled by YouTube as well.<p>My guess is YouTube wants to take a step towards broadcasting online instead of community videos.

I saw earlier in the discussion about the new Australian media laws re: Google’s use of news articles, a googler explain that Google News still exists as a gesture of good will from the company; as a service that costs them a rounding error, that some subset of users still use and enjoy, is something they keep doing just because they can.<p>I wonder how they would explain this.

Someone will write: &quot;Google continues the war against its own users&quot;.

&gt; Once you have same language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.<p>Oh so they realized it&#x27;s free labour and whant the users to train their speech recognition AI.

Google is a f*kng machine learning company, they do things randomly just an &quot;artificial intelligence&quot; would do. I wonder if there are executives left making any decision other than where to move the money.