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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

#171

Post by jlengrand »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #157
qtplatypus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube runs at a loss. If it was spun off from google it would not be viable.

as far as I'm aware nobody has ever shown this, all analysis I've seen that lead to that conclusion are based on ideas that Google pays Tier 1 provider rates for Youtube bandwidth, which is definitely not true (Google is directly peered with pretty much every ISP on earth)

There are some sources. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_go...

I still believe Google has a LARGE interest in owning it though. Obviously. It's simply maybe not good enough in itself

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

#172

Post by iforgotpassword »

nindalf wrote: post #167
iforgotpassword wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Youtu…

> 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.

You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto-generated subtitles like this is something trivial that just works. Compared to everything else that is required to run a platform like YouTube, community generated subtitles pale in comparison.

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

Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind? Never did the quality of a product suffer because corners were cut in order to save a few cents during production. Trusting a company like Google. A radical idea indeed.

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

#173

Post by dejawu »

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…

I hear this explanation a lot. What I don't get is how Google, a company known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers, hasn't realized that their organizational structure causes this sort of build-and-abandon pattern. In any case, the rest of us at large shouldn't have to suffer just because Google can't figure out how to build meaningfully long-lasting services.

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

#174

Post by root_axis »

fakedang wrote: post #50
rrdharan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that revenue and profit are distinct? Uber has massive revenues as do many other capital intensive businesses. That doesn't make them profitable.

Last time I checked, YouTube ads were a very profitable business. The parent to your comment chose revenue likely to note that Google makes money from the bed ie. it's not a service given away for free.

Is the definition of the word "free" another casualty of this era? It's literally free...

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

#175

Post by root_axis »

uluyol wrote: post #9

Google just wants to eliminate any remaining trust users have in them, don't they? 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,…

This is an HN bubble framing. The masses that enjoy YouTube don't "trust" google, YouTube is just another large entertainment platform among many, "trust" never enters the equation, its just an entertainment website.

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

#176

Post by coliveira »

packetlost wrote: post #170
jsheard wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that would require them to actually talk to customers. This is anathema to their way of operating.

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

#177

Post by nindalf »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #172
nindalf wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Youtu…

> 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. You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto-generated subtitles like this is…

> You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage

Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who. Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.

I'd ask you to reconsider this approach but tbh, this is the easiest way to farm upvotes on HN. So you do you.

> Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind

I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little.

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

#179

Post by vermilingua »

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.

I wonder how they would explain this.

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

#180

Post by iagovar »

freeone3000 wrote: post #169
iagovar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only for subtitles, and somehow if you go into another video, you have to do it again.
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