What's incredibly insane here, is that "low usage" is the excuse being used to terminate an accessibility feature. Accessibility features will always be low usage, but it's still important to provide them.
This is kinda like a restaurant removing their handicapped ramp because it's "not used often". Of course, that'd be illegal.
This is the clearest and most detrimental aspect of shutting this down. So many blind and/or deaf YouTube visitors depend on user-generated captioning.
One nitpick, I would disagree that accessibility features will always be low usage. Many accessibility features have become ubiquitous and essential features of many products. And many people preferred such captions who did not identify as needing accessibility features.
Not everything is identity politics. I think GP is speaking of those who signal a _need_ for accessibility features. These people would 'identify as needing accessibility features'. Others do not _need_ such features and therefore do not signal such. These people may still appreciate them on occasion. I for one, definitely would not claim to need closed captions, yet, if subtitles are available I may well use them. I might use them if my speakers are broken or if my roommate is asleep and I left my headphones in my car.
The virtual keyboard is another one that is incredibly useful to everyone when that one key on your keyboard craps out and you have to hobble along until the new one comes in the mail.
> And many people preferred such captions who did not identify as needing accessibility features
Good job on the selective quoting. /s
As a simple example, non-native speakers of a language may not identify as needing “accessibility features”, but captions certainly can help some of these folks.
That’s just one simple example. There are others.
For me personally, as a native speaker of English with good hearing, I often turn on captions for people who speak with heavy accents and videos with ambient noise that muddles the speaker’s audio.
Yeah, it's really shitty behavior, but are you surprised? YouTube is owned by Google, a company that routinely culls features or products not used by at-least a billion people a day.
They aren't going to change their behavior - this is how Google rolls and it works for Google. They only want popular, cool stuff - and catering to the disabled and less fortunate isn't popular or cool.
I doubt much can be done about this... Try to avoid their services, when possible? Don't give them money? Encourage others to avoid Google?
It's surprising because Google loves to use handicapped and disabled users as example cases of how important their technologies are. One of the most prominent early videos for the self-driving car project hinged on the idea that it would let a blind person go to a drive-thru at a restaurant.
When they turn around and cut off a surely much less cost-heavy accessibility feature seemingly at random, to many users complaint, it is, in fact, surprising.
As far as recourse, it'd be a bit of a stretch to use the ADA here, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone tried a lawsuit in this instance: Google is cutting off handicapped users for almost no real cost to themselves.
Based on what I've seen, it can't even cope with simple plain English - in a video I watched earlier, in just the first 90 seconds, "This subject has" -> "If his subject has", "A weapon that was" -> "Her weapon fat was", "spherical shape" -> "severe achill shape".
Whenever I don't understand something, I used to skip back and turn CCs on - this works fine if they were made by a human. It never works when they're automatically generated; if I can't understand it, there's a 100 % chance the automatic captions are garbage, and even if I can easily understand it, the automatic captions are still wrong like 80 % of the time.
Hell, it even sucks at accented English. A friend turned me onto the UK series Taskmaster, which is available on YouTube. I turn on captions/subtitles as a matter of habit, and the auto-generated captions for that show are atrocious.
Yes, that show includes a variety of UK English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, but... damn, it's bad.
Even if that was so, it's a bit like saying that blind won't need braille because there's text-to-speech. And English isn't the only language on youtube
it's funny how big tech has become like big government-
there is no recourse to your personal complaints even if it's shared by a large number of people
and
it's too expensive to roll out your own personal solution and share it with other people who think like you(think global scale not acquaintance scale) without using big tech
What popular ‘cool’ things are from Google these days? I can only think of the decade(s) old Search (the money making part bought), Maps (bought), Mail, Youtube (bought), maybe Android (bought). Is there another ‘cool’ billion+ used one?
Anything even semi-recent?
(No insider information, but) I suspect Drive, Photos, Assistant are all 1B+. Most of the new stuff from Google is features on existing products (which cover such broad markets that it's almost pointless launching major stuff as often).
Are those a billion plus by choice or by being preinstalled on Android? If by default the photos you take on an Android end up in Photos, everyone who has Photos in Photos is hardly a voluntary Photos user.
In this case, kind of, Google does work pretty hard on accessibility features. No one else has workable live transcriptions, and android accessibility suite is seeing constant improvements.
Maybe they think their ML transcription has gotten to a point where the process can be automated and maintaining crowdsource captions is not worth it / has liability. Still I disagree with this move. Genuinely curious what the cost/benefit analysis is. Most countries demographics are skewing older, I think it's worth maintaining these systems just in case.
This is why I have high respect for Apple, which routine ships new accessibility features and maintains them, despite them being very low usage. A few of those features end up becoming handy for non-accessibility users, like the ability to make your screen black and white on the iPhone or the ability to detect sounds.
I wonder (seriously) what the ROI on a statement like this might be. Is there a level where "responsibility to the shareholders" is sampled, or could it be a few layers of indirection away?
There is a pretty fine line between cynicism (i.e. it's just marketing) and idealism (ethical companies will generate a higher level of support), but I wonder how far this goes before a lawsuit shuts it down.
The business judgement rule gives company management pretty wide latitude in making business decisions so long as they are not blatantly fraudulent or conflicted. For example Shlensky v Wrigley[1] which concerns the owner of Wrigley field’s decision not to install lights and hold night games. A decision by their own admission motivated not by a business interest but by a personal belief that baseball is a “daytime sport”.
I have no idea about accessibility on iOS, but on the web making a website more accessible will usually make it display faster simply because accessibility forces you down a road that stops you filling a site with bloat and rubbish. If people pushed for accessible websites everyone would benefit from lower bandwidth usage and faster rendering.
It's not unreasonable to think pushing for an accessible OS makes the rest of it better as well.
Try using NextDNS to block HN. This is what I do on mobile -- I bury the NextDNS app in a folder and it requires several steps to un-do it. iOS 14 allows you to set DNS without using the VPN setting.
iOS 14 has some new Sleep stuff which semi-locks the phone at your "prepare for bed" time - you need to dismiss the "preparing for sleep" before you can unlock the phone.
I think Google might mean that the community wasn't actually taking advantage of the feature to provide very many subtitles (i.e. low supply); not that there weren't many people using such subtitles when available.
It's not quite like removing a ramp. It's more like a city had a program of "we'll help pave and maintain the sidewalk in front of your business to be more accessible, and to add ramps to connect to your door, by request"; but then no businesses took them up on that offer by requesting ramp installation—so they stopped offering the program.
Because the code still has to be actively maintained perpetually - internal APIs change over time, security risks have to be mitigated, some one (or some teams) have to have responsibility over this feature - and Google has decided it's not moving the needle enough to be worth it.
While technically true in this age of social distancing and increasingly online everything it probably should.
Youtube is essentially a Monopsony for monetized Internet video. So this will make many previously accessible channels inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Starting from August 2019, only uploaders can approve submissions, when previously other viewers or YouTube moderation could also publish. A lot of people seem to have forgotten this, and YouTube never really updated the UI/Help pages to reflect it.
I have to wonder if whichever analyst came up with those stats was aware of this but turning a blind eye, or simply never noticed.
This argument is my pet pieve. Whether it's about companies, governments, statistics, public debate: when you're dealing with large numbers of users/clients/citizens, a percent is still going to be a giant number of people! New Yorks population is also under a percent of the US total but were not shutting down any service over it! Large groups have large numbers of outliers! We support the blind and people in wheelchairs not because they're numerous enough, but because we care about including them.
This is statistical illiteracy that even smart people continuously use. It is absolutely wrong!
Yah, this is really poor. I know they have the auto-generated form, but it's far from 100% and a lot of words have a lot of domain specific nuance that it takes a person in that field to disambiguate.
They should think twice about bringing this one back. There may be some extra burden on their end too with violation/sabotage contributions showing up to contend with as well.
My favorite youtube channel is a Dutch guy who bought an old Russian tank and is getting it in working condition. He talks Dutch, with an accent, from his loud workshop, and uses all the right vocabulary for the things he is working on. This means, he is using a lot more than the most common 300 or so words.
There is no way automated captions can be anywhere near OK for that.
He currently has a community of volunteers supplying captions and has as a result an audience of Russians and other eastern europeans, who partly used to drive or work on these tanks, watching his channel. This is now made impossible thanks to google.
I was thinking too about another poor experience from auto captions. They're one long run on sentence. They have no sense of punctuation. Sometimes it makes comprehending what's being communicated pretty scrambled at times because the borders between statements and concepts can be blurred and you have to backtrack at times to follow what was being said and what word belongs to which sentence.
Given that many industries and governmental agencies are required to have accessible content it follows that if they do not move off of YouTube to a solution that provides the accessibility features they would be open to being sued. (obviously this is more relevant in regions where accessibility is more mandated by law and has appropriate fines for non compliance)
I think Youtube is only killing the community provided (a.k.a. anyone) subtitles, but the video owners can provide their own subtitles. If there is a risk for you to be sued for not providing captions, you would provide your own anyways.
Hmm yeah I overreacted, but will YouTube still provide the subtitle adding ability in YouTube studio - or will one have to add the subtitles externally?
The auto caption doesn't even detect the right language in many cases, doesn't have all languages, and is often comically bad. Maybe it's good for English but don't trust it for other languages.
On top if that, for multi lingual audio it is precisely useless, while multilingual audio is the norm in many countries or regions, as foreign sources are used as is rather than dubbed.
This was removed because the machine generated captions have reached near parity with crowdsourced captions. Machine captions can be scaled to caption the entirety of YouTube, something crowdsourcing could never accomplish.
That's not even close to true. Maybe it is for bog-standard American English, but whenever I watch a British show where you have people with a variety of accents (UK English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh), the auto-generated captions are pretty bad.
And in any language, the machine-generated captions don't have punctuation. You also miss out on non-speech cues that a manual captioner will often add, like a note that there's music playing in the background, or that a loud crash happened off-screen, or simply that a person laughed.
> Machine captions can be scaled to caption the entirety of YouTube, something crowdsourcing could never accomplish.
They certainly don't scale the same way, but one of the entire purposes of crowdsourcing is that it scales better than trying to employ what will inevitably be a smaller number of people. I still think there's value there, at least until machine-generated captions are actually on par with a human. We're not there yet.
As a non-english speaker (writer actually, since I cannot fluently speak) who routinely watches popsci/math/etc videos on youtube, I assure you that machine-generated subtitles are completely useless. It may "parse" the usual speech, but not specific terms, and when it fails often (it does), a text becomes a mess. By disabling user-generated content they basically pin everyone with hearing issues to funny cat videos and amazing pop star interviews. I don't think they can scale beyond that right now.
run together in an endless nonsense sentence also they're
useless because each word pops up on the
screen one a time very slowly in time with the audio
with arbitrary line breaks sounds useful but
it makes it impossible to read the captions and actually
watch the video because you're forced to keep
your eyes on the weirdly scrolling captions you
can't just read one line at a time like proper
captions and it never gets the hard to
hear words right you know the ones that
would benefit most from proper captions
---
Also, the machine-generated captions are completely devoid of punctuation and proper capitalization, so that all the words run together in an endless, nonsense sentence.
Also, they're useless because each word pops up on the screen one a time, very slowly (in time with the audio), with arbitrary line breaks. Sounds useful, but it makes it impossible to read the captions and actually watch the video because you're forced to keep your eyes on the weirdly scrolling captions--you can't just read one line at a time like proper captions.
And it never gets the hard-to-hear words right. You know, the ones that would benefit most from proper captions.
Creating real subtitles is as much a combination of art and skill and judgement and balance as editing the video itself.
A good subtitle allows you to quickly read ahead, and then move your eyes back to the video, back to the people speaking, so that you can watch them act out the line.
A good subtitle doesn't transcribe everything said word for word, but reduces spoken language to written language, and focuses on the gist of what's said.
A good subtitle for hearing-impaired viewers describe important sounds that happen off-screen, such as doors opening or closing, but skips non-important sounds, and sounds of things happening on-screen.
While they are technically different, they are very similar and much of the "art" is the same between them.
Good subtitles and CCs both have to be structured carefully so that they do not negatively impact the delivery of lines in the content. The biggest offender of this is comedy series as an improperly structured and timed CC or subtitle will ruin many jokes.
Another aspect of this is how they handle making it easy to digest multiple lines of dialogue. Good CCs and subtitles will either structure the dialogue such that a certain voice is always on top or bottom or alternatively will match colours to voices.
Similarly, in content that is visually busy or rapidly changing, good subtitles and CCs will stay out of the "busy" section of the screen and avoid using a colour or outline that would interfere with the readability based on the background of the scene.
They are different but with regards to what makes them good, they are basically the same.
And to add on to this, on just about everything but live feeds, they are produced and added to video more or less the same way.
One difference is that captions shouldn't differ too much from the original audio. If they do, it's confusing if you're reading and listening at the same time. Translated subtitles don't have this problem.
> They are different but with regards to what makes them good, they are basically the same.
Yes. The rules for how long to show a subtitle, and when to pop them in and out are the same, regardless of the actual text shown. Everyone can decide what characters-per-second limit works for them, but whatever you choose, it fundamentally alters everything else and restricts what text can actually go in the subtitle. Translated or not translated, sound cues or no sound cues.
God your example is such a good demonstration. Captions are an art and not simply "correct is correct". They also have to be timed correctly to match what is being shown on the screen as well as pausing for the correct amount of time to match the effects that the speaker is giving.
I'm pretty sure crowdsourcing subtitles in different languages is the primary use of the feature precisely because machine generated translation of machine generated captions produces gibberish.
I think it only applied to English. For example, autogenerated caption for Japanese videos usually fails miserably, even a Japanese learner can easily spot where the wrong is, and it is not uncommon.
And some languages just don't get autogenerated captions at all. "No captions available" is pretty common on videos even from fairly large European countries. I think Russian, English, French, German and possibly Spanish and Italian frequently get autogenerated captions, but Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech... (languages I deal with frequently) sorry, no captions.
Machine captions in English. Not in non-English. Swedish and Norwegian, both fairly close to English, when compared to say, Chinese of Japanese, have no autogenerated captions - the system simply never offers that as an option. If you think the system is perfect, you are very wrong.
Creators can also add their own captions in multiple languages, but this relies on them working together with the community, which may not always be realistic.
Youtube automatic transcriptions may be state-of-the-art technology, but from the perspective of a human consummer they're still extremely poor quality.
I like to put on captions in my second language, and the automatic captions are basically just annoying UI spam.
I can imagine how invaluable it is for a deaf person, they must get used to assume every transcribed word has only a 60% probability of being right, and quickly infer an array of possible meanings through context. But the experience is not comparable to human-transcribed subtitles.
Very often auto captioning doesn't even detect the right language and then proceed to try match phonemes from the original language into words of the caption language.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"Some people will abuse it, therefore no-one should have it" is a strongly growing mentality in these days, and woe betide us if we keep pursuing it deeper without proper consideration for each case.
I think the real reason is more that detecting and handling abuse would require personnel. This is the one area that makes google and youtube really successful: they've managed to offer services with an absolute minimum (or outright absence of (human) customer service). This cuts out a lot of overhead.
It also lets them avoid a lot of difficult decisions wrt policing speech which is something youtube has established a long history of being awful at.
Fear of abuse is just the excuse entities use to avoid providing services they have other reasons to oppose. Heavily abused services continue to exist if they're profitable enough or sufficiently socially useful.
All adtech and most social media is both abusive and socially destructive, but it's profitable enough for the Right people that there's no serious prospect of it being shut down.
The road network sees a lot of abuse (e.g. transportation of illegal property, impaired driving, simply allowing criminals to move freely) but it's too socially useful to shut down.
Fear of abuse is just a cover for withdrawing, or failing to provide, services for other, unstated, reasons.
If you look at very popular YouTubers, they will have captions translated in 20 languages or more. I'm not sure uploader approval is doing much in that case.
I wildly guess that you may find long-standing relationships between those popular creators and the caption writers, such that they've built some measure of trust. Captions contributed by a new author might get vetted more closely, e.g. at least run through an online translator to see whether it's plainly wrong / torrent of insults / etc.
There's also the situation where regular people submit their "community-contributed" captions where it's obvious that they used Google Translate themselves.
On the other hand, I've seen some shockingly good machine captions, where I'm fairly sure they were machine because they were just uploaded or I noticed technical terms being transcribed phonetically, but they nevertheless manage to transcribe better than I can understand it. My theory is that they prioritize the full-power RNN transcriptions for only some new videos, and haven't gone back over the full historical YT corpus.
The captions for Google meetings are frighteningly good and accurate. We use a lot of acronyms, and made up words that it turns into acronyms. I sometimes get spooked because even with it off, I know all those meetings and social calls are sitting in some google db to be turned into something someday.
I wish they'd care more about people with foreign accents. I still find any type of google voice recognition unusable, unless I lay on a really bad fake texan accent.
I am well aware of that, but when the video comes with no slides and not even a summary, you can guess that they were not paying hundreds of dollars to have it professionally transcribed, and you can also guess that humans were not involved anywhere in the process (either to generate or review it) when they, say, phonetically transcribe fairly common technical jargon which is written prominently on the slide which has been fullscreened for the past minute in the video.
(Is it really so hard to believe that the usual neural network progress curve has happened for speech transcription and that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed across videos?)
According to the article, captions have to be enabled and then individually approved by the channel owner. So of course you'd be unlikely to see spam or abuse in captions since the channel owner is filtering that spam and abuse out.
Not saying I agree with Google's decision. Just saying it makes sense that you wouldn't see spam and abuse.
If the article is accurate -- that crowdsources translations always had to be approved by the creator anyways -- then I don't see why third-party sites for this won't pop up, which any channel can direct its users to.
> YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage.
I mean, while the feature was cool, it honestly makes sense to me that it was too niche for YouTube to focus resources on maintaining. (And a lot of people drastically underestimate the constant attention spam prevention requires -- it's horrible, really.)
Seriously -- this seems like an awesome opportunity for someone (anyone) to create a superior tool for this, no? A separate community with quality control tools, reputations, discussion boards... And then the creator just easily imports a finished crowdsourced sets of captions/subtitles to their video.
Honestly this feels like an ideal "Show HN" project. Not only that, it could grow to become a community hub for crowdsources captioning/subtitling for videos across all platforms, and even bootstrap itself into becoming a major video hosting platform in its own right.
Maybe I'm just a glass-half-full guy here, but I see this as a real opportunity. And I have to assume a third party site for this will ultimately do a better job than Google's tool enabled anyways.
YouTube is not getting rid of it's hit/miss auto-generated captions. Here's an instance from this year where the auto-generator thought people were saying slurs, but they weren't:
> the auto-generator thought people were saying slurs, but they weren't
I'm sympathetic towards YouTube on this particular issue. I clearly remember that there was an early time when a lot of slurs were filtered from YouTube's auto-generator output to prevent such incidents, and then there were some furious complaints about how YouTube censors words in the caption. For example, see [0], and note how the comments are overwhelmingly negative, "Is YouTube becoming a kindergarten now?", "Haven't you got the latest dictionary of Newspeak?", "The age of snowflakes", yet no one realized the serious technical problem of incorrectly identifying words as slur.
And now many word filters on auto-generator output have been lifted as the system became more reliable, then we get some furious complaints about how YouTube incorrectly identifies words as slurs.
I think there has been a similar accusation that claims Google removes negative keywords for certain politicians from its search recommendations. But a quick test could confirm that it was true even for convicted criminals. Same reason - incorrectly recommending negative keywords about living persons would be a serious incident.
The point is to avoid false positives for autogenerated captions, since false positives are what's damaging about allowing slurs in autogenerated captions, not slurs in captions in general.
For example, imagine there is a video where someone says a slur and the system transcribes that slur without censoring. If you detected it correctly (true positive), then everything is fine. However, if there was no slur and you detected it as a slur (false positive), it is a big problem. Imagine watching some video talking about perfume, the narrator says something like "the smell lingers for a while", and the transcription code thinks it got the n-word instead of "lingers". It would be disastrous.
Now imagine there is a censoring system in place for slurs. What it does, it simply gets rid of false positives at the root by completely removing them from the list of possible words to autogenerate, thus guaranteeing that situations like the one I brought up above could never happen. So now, if it is a true positive that nets a slur word, it just gets rid of that word. PR disaster avoided.
"Censorship", in this case, is just a very unfortunate side-effect of solving that problem I described above. As long as they don't censor those words in manually created captions, I am totally ok with it, because then the burden of a false positive is on the person who wrote the captions. I.e., if google doesn't ban "true positive slur" scenarios in manually generated captions, imo it is a reasonable and understandable compromise.
Censoring (as in bleeping) doesn't prevent the damage. It's like a phone autocorrecting "duck" to "f*ck". Putting a star there doesn't undo the "damage" of getting it wrong.
Autocorrects solve this by omitting the word from their dictionary altogether, so if a false positive happens it's from duck to luck, not duck to something censored.
If the censorship of text is complete (i.e. just the text "[censored]" instead of any word at all), then in a false-positive scenario, the "[censored]" will appear entirely out-of-context (since it wasn't the right word to begin with), so there'll be no way, just by reading the resulting text, to intuitively figure out what word the system thought it had recognized.
The best failure mode is none of those. Using your example, the best one is the one that finds the closest approximate word that isn't a slur.
That would solve both problems at once, because there is a really strong chance that the first closest guess that isn't a slur is the actual correct word that was said there. And in case it picks an incorrect word, it would have picked it either way and it would have been just as wrong.
So if the voice said "Because lucky you, that's why", in case youtube autotranscript thinks it was "fuck" and not "lucky", it would either default to "lucky" (which is good) or another closest non-slur word like "mucky" or "rocky".
And, in my opinion, this is way better than putting [censored] or any other workaround out of those you mentioned, because all of them have zero chance to end up as the correct word (in case the slur was detected incorrectly), while with the approach I described, it is very possible.
I don't think deaf users would agree with you. Because they are going to be trying to understand if they actually said lucky rather than fuck. Better to choose the best match, and fuck the prudes.
The false-positive case is more like, e.g. "[censored] the chicken crossed the road." There's no slur/curse that actually makes sense in that position, according to the rules of the English language, so there's no implication.
This thread isn't about what may usually happen, but rather about the potential damage of an outlier, such as auto-captioning a slur in a the speech of a foreign official with a heavy accent.
When YouTube was censoring slurs in automatic captions, it was just a simple search and removal.
Caption 5: "Because you, that's why"
Not the best failure mode, but it does completely prevent the damage, <del>and your argument about how censorship doesn't prevent damage doesn't apply</del>.
Inadvertently censoring slurs from all subtitles with the intention of removing slurs from automatically-generated subtitles due to concerns on their correctness could be a persuadable explanation.
BTW, I don't know whether the word filter was used on all subtitles or only automatic ones, so I'm limiting my scope of discussion strictly on automatically-generated subtitles.
I think there's a big legal distinction between publishing unaltered user content that contains offensive content and creating such content yourself (the subtitles are created by Google software, thus, by Google). It is similar to banning a lot more words from "auto complete" than actually banning them from the search items that can be used if you were to actually type them, it's because the "auto complete" content can be argued that it's Google generated content and as such Google might be legally liable for it.
I've worked with the accessibility team at YouTube. That team has brilliant engineers who are themselves blind or deaf, so they really do understand their customers, even if that community is relatively small. If this a grassroots decision from that team, I'm sure they have thought long and hard about it, and I respect that decision.
I still believe Alphabet is a company that truly wants to make the world a better place -- I hope they're living by their principles, and not letting the profits (of which they have plenty) get in way.
This is plain wrong. Other comments have already given many arguments against this decision, but here is another one: language learners. I've used Youtube to learn German and Japanese. Those subtitles help me figure out what native speakers are saying, specially for videos which are not "clear" enough for the auto-generated subtitles to be good.
>it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse.
> 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.
What in the world is their motivation here?? This is the kind of thing a company wouldn’t do if they were worried, at all, about competition.
Monitoring crowd-sourced captions on political videos and monitoring for abused/slanting the wording sounds like a Hard Problem, in a political minefield of language nuance.
They're not worried about competition in the video captioning market because they're not a video captioning company. They're probably losing money on the feature and are happy to offload the work to someone else.
I mean, Google kind of are a video captioning company. Google Video was created with the goal of letting you search videos by indexing the automatic textual transcriptions of their audio content. YouTube still performs that role for Google Search; that's why Google's automatic transcription is as good as it is already.
That time was a mixed blessing. They took away the ability to cheaply correct information on video after upload, but they also killed a lot of annoying spam.
Maybe in both cases they did some A/B testing and found out ads were more effective without either feature. Like isn't it obvious that text boxes interfere with ads, take some attention away from them. Not as obvious with subtitles, but I can see how pushing people to watch something else without subtitles rather than letting them stay on videos and read subtitles is better for ads designed for being viewed in watching context, not reading context.
I've noticed that the content creators I watch who used to use annotations for corrections still have roughly the same number of corrections in their video, but they're being done in the edit rather than post-upload.
I've got no hard evidence of this, but I feel like the removal of that feature got rid of a lot of the annoying spam, and the people who were using it correctly just started paying more attention to their videos before they uploaded them.
Obviously some will still get missed, but I think the overall accuracy of the actual videos has increased substantially.
I finally figured out what got Google scared enough to get rid of video annotations, when I realized that around the same time they also disabled the ability to make embedded YouTube videos full-screen.
Because, if a website can embed a YouTube video of a Windows desktop; and either use Javascript to make it fullscreen, or convince you to make the video fullscreen and then "animate" the video closing itself to give you the illusion that you're no longer in the video; and then use annotations to turn the Windows desktop video you're now staring at into an image-map, such that the user will click on the video, thinking they're closing a window on this "desktop"... then you can get all sorts of bad things to happen.
Remember: many websites (e.g. blog hosts, forums, commenting systems) that don't support Javascript per se, still support automatic YouTube video embedding by posting a YouTube video URL.
I’m fascinated but don’t understand how they could be a thing in reality. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever seen or known has a pretty unique desktop cluttered with installed apps and files and usually with a custom background.
How could the attackers video simulation of a windows desktop fool the user into thinking they are still on their own computer?
Such tricks are aimed at the same sort of people who are the target for the badly-spelled-and-grammaticized text in 419 scam emails. Such people don’t tend to have a very good sense of the “formal etiquette of computer software vendors”, so to speak—they don’t know to expect that a system will be guaranteed to follow certain unchanging stylistic conventions.
To such users, an OS desktop is an unpredictable thing. Their (live) wallpaper and (dynamic) lock-screen background change out from under them at random. Their theme changes between Light and Dark (and they haven’t yet noticed the concordance with the time of day.) The Google Doodle changes without a seeming pattern (and they’ve never clicked on it to find out why.) Every once in a while, an app updates and looks entirely different after a restart. New application shortcuts appear seemingly at random on their desktop. Whenever their nephew “fixes” their computer, most of those disappear, and many other features get changed as well. Was it something the nephew did? Or were those just temporary, and disappear if you restart the computer? Or were they viruses?
Why would such a user even be surprised if, one day, the computer decided to change everything about their desktop out from under them while they were in the middle of watching a video? Par for the course. Computers are unpredictable.
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But also, it’s pretty easy to make the “desktop” part of the desktop irrelevant. The goal here is to re-invoke the concept that the user is looking at their OS chrome (i.e. “windowed mode”, rather than “fullscreen mode”); not that they’re looking at their desktop specifically.
So, in the video, just display a maximized Chrome window showing YouTube navigated to the innocuous “bait” video that was previously playing up to that point, as if the video had been first navigated to and then de-fullscreened. And then, show the pop-up window on top of that maximized Chrome window.
The only thing the video’s author needs to get right, at that point, are 1. Chrome’s window decorations, and 2. the taskbar.
(It doesn’t matter if the user isn’t using Chrome; even I, as a power-user, wouldn’t find it strange to find that something I had done had managed to install Chrome and force it to open a URL. Happens on Windows with things accidentally opening in Edge all the time. And lots of programs have dark-pattern installers that try to install Chrome for you; especially those of other Google products, e.g. Google Earth, Google Drive, etc.)
> It doesn’t matter if the user isn’t using Chrome; even I, as a power-user, wouldn’t find it strange to find that something I had done had managed to install Chrome and force it to open a URL.
It's even worse than that.
I use Firefox predominantly, but I do have Chrome installed for the occasional use (webdev, some browser-discriminating webapps, more stable Netflix). I'm a power user too, and yet I already had a few situations in the recent years, where I'd switch to a browser to find some information quickly, only to realize after few minutes that I'm using the wrong browser.
And for those tech-scam-vulnerable people, a browser is just a big rectangle showing the Internet, with a bit of visual noise surrounding the tab bar and the box in which you type "google". I know some people who probably wouldn't notice if I switched their Chrome for Firefox, or perhaps even for Edge.
Let's imagine VLC had a caption editor. Let's imagine VLC found it required lots of maintenance, it's got to support every language on the planet in every OS, and it was just turning out to be a drag on dev. They've got limited resources and they checked their metrics and found only 0.001% of people were using it. They see that it's still fully possible to make your own captions using tons of other software or even by hand using text files in various standard format and VLC reads those formats just fine. If I ran VLC I'd get rid of it.
Google is doing no different here. They are not getting rid of captions. They are not getting rid of user captions. They are only getting rid of their onsite caption editor. You can still create captions a thousand other ways. You can still give them to the author of the video and they can upload them into youtube in supported formats and apply them to the video.
Want to community edit a captions? Google docs or Google sheets would be two fine places to that. So might github. There's no need for a UI on Youtube for this.
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.
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.
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.
It's amazing how committed YouTube is to destroying everything that makes their platform worthwhile, and turning it into a TV channel where You can just go ahead and join a major media corporation for access to the Tube.
What is "low usage" by Google's standard? A million users? 10 million users? What may look like a blip on Google's radar possibly eclipses a successful startup's entire profit-generating user base.
So then there can be a website or browser extension built to create subtitles. We aren't dependent on YouTube to do everything for us.
Especially if the sub's are stored and shared, it will enable them to be used on mirror videos in case YouTube takes something down.
I actually think this a good thing. Maybe the community will actually we that dependence on proprietary systems isn't a good thing.
Worse than that. The grim reaper is competent.
YouTubers are not. Their much hyped youtube notification api is buggy and broken. There's just 3 events you can subscribe to - only 1 of them works.
I don't know why Apple hasn't positioned video podcasts as an alternative to YouTube.
They already exist, and the subscriber mechanism is already better than YouTube (view offline, choose when/what to download), just needs some work for comments, ratings, annotations etc.
The ability to search on the internal content of videos I would have considered fking important. Who cares if no-one uses it, the robots should be using it.
It's somewhat amazing Google and YouTube don't do it.
So I'm not sure what the real reason is here?
I could see spammers flooding shitty videos no one watches with fake captions, or popular videos with obscure languages and fake captions and it destroying their search. But currently it doesn't seem to matter anyway.
This is kinda like a restaurant removing their handicapped ramp because it's "not used often". Of course, that'd be illegal.