YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

Post by innocenat » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #135

MrCzar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you recommend a tool that does subtitles and generates a .srt afterwards, from your experience? 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've tested a couple of the popular free ones, and settled on Aegisub. The default keybindings drove me nuts, they're not very ergonomic, but at least you can fix that easily. .srt is the lowest common denominator for subtitle files, every subtitling program can import and export those. It's a pretty dumb format though, my biggest issue with it is that it doesn't have support for fixed-position left-aligned subtitles…

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #192

CydeWeys wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They translated it once years ago, likely using external resources. My team has had this issue; we made internationalized versions of our website once, years ago, and it was quite expensive and used external language contractors. Then the i18n versions gradually fell out of date as we continually updated the English version (because that's what we full-time devs speak). Eventually, years later, the i18n versions were…

But if you had put yourselves in a position to accept community contributed translations, this would not have happened, right?

Post by pwinnski » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

frei wrote: post #39

pwinnski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. It seems like creators have until September 28 to choose to publish existing community contributions, and if they don't, it seems like they will all disappear. That's how I interpret, "You have until September 28, 2020 to publish your community contributions before they’re removed."

I've done some translating on YouTube. What it means is if your translation is in draft mode (you're still working on it) on 9/28 it will disappear. The video creator shouldn't need to do anything here.

Post by gorkish » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

dejawu wrote: post #173

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…

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.

Post by uluyol » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #30

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,…

> Fine, but why are they so bad at weighing it against long term trust? 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…