YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #96

numpad0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale? I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs con…

I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the…

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by majewsky » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #96

numpad0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale? I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs con…

I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the…

> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation.

Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having different plural forms (so you might need to translate "users" differently depending on if you're talking about 2 users or 3 users).

This is not rocket science. We know how to do it. It's just that most businesses don't give a shit. English gets you far enough in terms of adoption in most markets that you don't really have to care about l10n unless you have to fulfil legal requirements. (Also, some markets have bad rates of English literacy, e.g. China, but those are usually served by local app providers.)

> On some streaming/movie purchasing services, it can be hard to get a movie in the original version and not a localised one

Where I live (Germany), this has gotten way better over the years. Around ten years ago, cinema chains started offering screenings in original language (i.e. English) for the more popular movies. And cable TV started showing shows undubbed as well. The first thing I can remember there was Game of Thrones airing undubbed on the same day as the US release. I think the major reason was that piracy sites allowed users to access undubbed content easily. If you have the choice of watching the new GoT episode right now or waiting a year for the dub, most people are going to go with piracy. TV/cinema execs saw this and realized that there was a market to tap into.

Having access to undubbed content was actually quite eye-opening to me. Having only had contact with dubs up until that point, I only then realized how eye-wateringly shitty German dubs are. It appears to me like German dubbers don't really consider themselves voice actors (emphasis on the "actor" part). Sometimes it's like they think they're reading a newscast when it's actually an action scene.

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

#213

Post by majewsky » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

SllX wrote: post #82

curiousgal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the Live Caption feature on Pixel phone (which can transcribe videos you are watching) is great. Maybe they plan on rolling that.

A lifetime of thinking that companies can reimplement cool tech they have in use somewhere else in a place that it would be even more useful has left me disappointed in the possibilities. I’m not familiar with Pixels because I don’t use them, but even if I took you at your word that it is automated captioning that works, I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will show up on YouTube just because Google has the tech on a P…

Search became less useful because it's optimizing for ad revenue, not user experience. I don't see that conflict of interest here. If anything, better subtitles would lead to more watch minutes (from non-natives) and hence more ad revenue.

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

#214

Post by Tainnor » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #212

Tainnor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the…

> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having di…

You're not contradicting me It's not that we don't have the technology to do proper localisation, it's that the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users. There is this assumption that 1 person = 1 language which is just wrong in many parts of the world.

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

#215

Post by majewsky » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #214

majewsky wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. Absolutely not. I saw the i18n/l10n process in practice when I was contributing code to KDE. It was incredibly thorough and well thought-out (I actually learnt most of what I know about i18n/l10n at that time). Not just translating strings verbatim, but stuff like different languages having di…

You're not contradicting me It's not that we don't have the technology to do proper localisation, it's that the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users. There is this assumption that 1 person = 1 language which is just wrong in many parts of the world.

My disagreement is that, in the phrase

> tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation

you're using "understood" when it should actually be "cared about" which is substantially different. Also,

> the tech industry is oblivious to the needs of non-English speakers and in particular multilingual users

I'm part of the tech industry and at the same time a non-English speaker and multilingual users, and I'm not oblivious to my own needs. The problem is not that tech people don't understand, it's that business decisions don't take multilingual users into account.

This differentiation is important. Rephrased like this, it becomes apparent that this is a matter of policy, not literacy. It becomes possible to imagine (though I'm not arguing this) a scenario in which apps with a sufficient number of users could be required by law to accommodate multilingual users.

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

#216

Post by jquery » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #185

thayne wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they are aware (or at least some people there are aware), especially since it is repeatedly pointed out on the internet. They just might not care.

I can't imagine they care. Yeah, people are justifiably upset that they dropped this feature. But they are also, to my knowledge, the online video source that ever offered a feature like this in the first place. So nobody's upset is realistically going to translate into an exodus to a competitor, and the effect on their bottom line is negligible, and they have zero reason to care. You know how the last 3 hours of any…

We’ve been at that phase of the game for centuries if not longer. There is no easy fix

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

#217

Post by spc476 » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #121

spc476 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some math shows that can't work. Half a trillion to 35 million is US$15,000 per person. For one year. And people will complain that US$15,000 is not enough to live on. What happens in year two?

Google goes bust? That's not likely, is it? Does Google have no concept of how YouTube drives ad sales and other synergies? Or of how much goodwill is worth?

Does any company make $500,000,000 a year?

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

#218

Post by norswap » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 12:03 AM 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.

Are they though? ("Known for being exceptionally clever in how it manages engineers?") I've actually never heard something in that direction, in many signs it is not the case (starting with broken recruiting).

It is however I believe good at keeping engineers happy, and good and good at managing their engineer infrastructure (though it is very Google-specific, and not necessarily a good fit for the rest of the world). But that doesn't say that engineers are being managed cleverly or efficiently.

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

#219

Post by RealStickman_ » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

glenstein wrote: post #210

RealStickman_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can torrent the video and they should then also be served from your machine.

From this FAQ it looks like you may be able to as long as you torrent from something that is WebRTC friendly. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#s...

I wasn't aware of the WebRTC requirement. Thanks