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YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

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Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#161

Post by ecmascript »

MandieD wrote: post #108

Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I don't 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. For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family nam…

Google does that for some products for us swedes as well which is very annoying since most of us are fluent in english. Even if it was in a language I don't speak I rather have it the native language because translating it often makes little sense and I can translate stuff myself when I need it, which isn't that often.

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.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#162

Post by crazygringo »

pen2l wrote: post #151

What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels. 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 y…

I don't know about that particular channel, but particularly in the language-learning area with community sourcing, I've seen horrendous translations that do far more harm than good. Getting nouns completely wrong, tenses wrong, etc.

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.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#163

Post by julianlam »

pen2l wrote: post #151

What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels. 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 y…

My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned.

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.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#165

Post by shadowgovt »

julianlam wrote: post #163
pen2l wrote: post #151

What fucking bollocks, community-added subs are an absolute boon for language learning channels. 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 y…

My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned. There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile…

In this specific case, I think it's more that they had numbers on use vs. abuse and decided it was too expensive to maintain.

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.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#166

Post by claudiawerner »

wwweston wrote: post #36
dodobirdlord wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re getting hammered from the left for insufficient moderation of content, and from the right for overly aggressive moderation of content. It’s a lose-lose where the only real option is to remove extraneous features that enable users to upload content visible to others. Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there’s too much to moderate.

[flagged]

>Lots of people really have no principled philosophy of free speech beyond wanting their own privileged.

And similarly, a lot of people do have a principled philosophy of free speech, but it is built upon shaky grounds that are empirically or morally dubious or otherwise.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#167

Post by nindalf »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #158
nindalf wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly they need some method of prioritizing their work. HN would have you believe that every product and every feature should be supported till the end of time, regardless of whether it's used or not. In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit. > I'm subscribed to about 100 channels How often have you actually relied on commun…

> How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles? Almost never, since all the content I consume is in English. But several channels made posts about that upcoming change and there was quite some feedback by people depending on this (as far as I could tell, especially the Spanish speaking community). > In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenanc…

So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

> By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too,

You made an implicit assumptions that TV subtitles and Youtube community contributed subtitles are used by the same proportion of people. That's almost certainly wrong. And remember, Youtube auto generated subtitles still exist for all videos.

Look I don't work for Google, but it pains me when I see a thread full of people shitting on them without any basis in fact.

Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#168

Post by jsheard »

shadowgovt wrote: post #165
julianlam wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that at Google, building something novel (e.g. community contributions) is more important than maintaining something (e.g. dealing with spam/abuse in community contributions). Unless it brings in profit or collects valuable user data, anything that takes developer hours to maintain eventually gets canned. There could be a code silo issue here as well. My understanding is Google dev teams are very mobile…

In this specific case, I think it's more that they had numbers on use vs. abuse and decided it was too expensive to maintain. 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.

Some creators I follow have said they wanted to use community translations but didn't because the feature was underdeveloped. Particularly the fact that contributions are anonymous so there's no way to build trust in a particular translator, every translation for every video needs to be scrutinized and they just don't have time.

But from Googles beep boop robot analytics perspective they just see that nobody is using the feature and assume it's because nobody wants it.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#169

Post by freeone3000 »

iagovar wrote: post #100
darthoctopus wrote: post #2

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.

There was no option to disable them, and if you are multilingual it's a PITA. Sometimes I became so annoyed that I closed YT. 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 s…

Toolbar in the bottom right, subtitle icon, disable.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#170

Post by packetlost »

jsheard wrote: post #168
shadowgovt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this specific case, I think it's more that they had numbers on use vs. abuse and decided it was too expensive to maintain. 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.

Some creators I follow have said they wanted to use community translations but didn't because the feature was underdeveloped. Particularly the fact that contributions are anonymous so there's no way to build trust in a particular translator, every translation for every video needs to be scrutinized and they just don't have time. But from Googles beep boop robot analytics perspective they just see that nobody is using…

It's almost like Google's product owners have no idea how to build and maintain comprehensive products. If people aren't using a feature, figure out why and can it if it's not being used because of a lack of interest instead of said feature being poorly implemented or maintained.

Does Google talk to anyone outside of their engineering bro culture?

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