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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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

nindalf wrote: post #52
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.

> I don’t think this functionality was as little used Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. > Clearly more options exist for managing spam Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by SllX »

curiousgal wrote: post #59
SllX wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their automated CC sucks, always has, and I check multiple times a year only to see that it still sucks, most recently last month. I’ve never had the best hearing, so I usually turn CC on when I can, particularly with ESL speakers with heavy accents; but if the only option on a YouTube video is the automated captions, then the only option is crap and I’ll go without. On the other hand channels with a large dedicated…

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 Pixel.

It’s not like companies like Google have never had technical regressions either. Their core service, Google Search, is less useful to me than it was 10 years ago.

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

#83

Post by ipsum2 »

birdyrooster wrote: post #6

It is too bad that the automated speech to text isn’t good enough to allow them to turn this feature off without losing a great deal of high quality subtitling.

Even if they had captions, it would be impossible to translate certain things (e.g. lyrics, technical or scientific terms) to another language automatically well.

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

#84

Post by SllX »

smusamashah wrote: post #79
SllX wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their automated CC sucks, always has, and I check multiple times a year only to see that it still sucks, most recently last month. I’ve never had the best hearing, so I usually turn CC on when I can, particularly with ESL speakers with heavy accents; but if the only option on a YouTube video is the automated captions, then the only option is crap and I’ll go without. On the other hand channels with a large dedicated…

Have you tried Google recorder app on Android? It's amazing.

I have not, but I responded to a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006491

but the tl;dr amounts to just because a company has the technology does not mean it is broadly applied across all of its services where it would be most useful. That said, if YouTube ever implements automated CC that works I’ll happily scarf down that humble pie.

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

#85

Post by Y_Y »

numpad0 wrote: post #14
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.

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…

Even trying to use popular software in a relatively big language like Spanish still inevitably ends up producing lots of untranslated strings (or worse, semi-translated nonsense).

I always set my software to en-us, even though that mightn't be my preferred language or dialect, because it's the only way I can be sure the developers actually checked it.

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

#86

Post by KMag »

Curzel wrote: post #75
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.

Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare

My wife is a native Thai speaker, fluent in English, but if the speaker is speaking quickly and not clearly, it's very frustrating for her to follow along (especially if the speakers themselves are non-native speakers, or speaking with an Australian accent). Most of the automated subtitles on Youtube seem heavily biased toward high-school level vocabulary, so if the speaker is using more rare words, making literary references, or using some of the more common Latin / Greek / French phrases imported into English (medical/technical terminology, etc.), the subtitles can be very misleading. The automated subtitles are also generally garbage at catching proper nouns, often replacing them with rhyming phrases of common words.

At least the garbage is pretty consistent, so I can pause the videa and tell my wife that the phrase X Y Z in the subtitles is actually A B. (The number of syllables is almost always correct, but often the number of words is not.)

On a side note, it's not YouTube, and it's translation instead of strait subtitling, but I've seen some pretty bad English subtitles for Netflix's La Casa de Papel (Money Heist). I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I do remember a few times the translations were very odd and I realized the translator was translating a person's surname from Spanish into its English meaning, and not capitalizing it. It would have been just fine leaving the name untranslated, as my wife and I could both clearly make out the names of the characters. I presume a human translator would know not to translate names. I hope the subtitles I saw were third-party subtitles where someone ran Spanish subtitles through Google Translate.

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

#87

Post by bzb3 »

curiousgal wrote: post #59
SllX wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their automated CC sucks, always has, and I check multiple times a year only to see that it still sucks, most recently last month. I’ve never had the best hearing, so I usually turn CC on when I can, particularly with ESL speakers with heavy accents; but if the only option on a YouTube video is the automated captions, then the only option is crap and I’ll go without. On the other hand channels with a large dedicated…

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.

Plus one to this. I was pleasantly surprised to the point of being spooked with the quality of transcriptions on my pixel phone.

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

#88

Post by bambax »

nindalf wrote: post #52
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.

> I don’t think this functionality was as little used Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. > Clearly more options exist for managing spam Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just…

"little used" is a stupid argument from YT. It may be little used on a global scale but vital to some specific groups.

By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.

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

#89

Post by LockAndLol »

system2 wrote: post #80
ehsankia wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one of these provides community contributed captioning?

Better question: Which one of these even have a community?

Be the change you want to see. If all y'all do is sit around and complain that there isn't a community instead of joining the small community that already exists and growing it, well big surprise, it won't grow (at least not as quickly).

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

#90

Post by jobigoud »

Curzel wrote: post #75
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.

Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare

Another use case is when you want to watch a video without the audio to avoid bothering the people around.

Auto closed captions quality depend on the language and the locutor. It works well for "presentation" content like vlogs and news, it fails for casual discussion or songs.

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