YouTube Criticized For Ending Its Community Captions Feature (theverge.com) 36
Long-time Slashdot reader xonen quotes the Verge:
YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature, which allowed viewers to add subtitles to videos, because it was "rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," the company announced. It says it's removing the captions and will "focus on other creator tools." The feature will be removed as of September 28th.
"You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services," YouTube said in an update on its help page. But deaf and hard-of-hearing creators say removing the community captions feature will stifle accessibility, and they want to see the company try to fix the issues with volunteer-created captions, rather than doing away with them entirely. Deaf YouTuber Rikki Poynter said on her channel in May that community captions were an "accessibility tool that not only allowed deaf and hard of hearing people to watch videos with captions, but allowed creators that could not afford to financially invest in captions." She tweeted Thursday that she was disappointed with YouTube's decision.
YouTuber JT, whose channel has more than 550,000 subscribers, highlighted the downside of the community captions feature last year, showing how viewers were adding abusive comments to videos by popular creators. But many creators say they relied on the captions not only to better reach deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but to help translate their videos into other languages, giving them a larger audience.
YouTube is offering a free six-month subscription to a subtitling service for regular users of the community contribution feature — but not everyone is satisfied, according to the Verge. A petition calling on Google to reverse the decision has now garnered more than 155,000 signatures.
"You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services," YouTube said in an update on its help page. But deaf and hard-of-hearing creators say removing the community captions feature will stifle accessibility, and they want to see the company try to fix the issues with volunteer-created captions, rather than doing away with them entirely. Deaf YouTuber Rikki Poynter said on her channel in May that community captions were an "accessibility tool that not only allowed deaf and hard of hearing people to watch videos with captions, but allowed creators that could not afford to financially invest in captions." She tweeted Thursday that she was disappointed with YouTube's decision.
YouTuber JT, whose channel has more than 550,000 subscribers, highlighted the downside of the community captions feature last year, showing how viewers were adding abusive comments to videos by popular creators. But many creators say they relied on the captions not only to better reach deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but to help translate their videos into other languages, giving them a larger audience.
YouTube is offering a free six-month subscription to a subtitling service for regular users of the community contribution feature — but not everyone is satisfied, according to the Verge. A petition calling on Google to reverse the decision has now garnered more than 155,000 signatures.
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He said, trying to derail a thread that concerns the rights of the disabled, codified into the laws of any country worth its salt.
No more kpop stars (Score:4, Interesting)
Without community subtitles, English-speakers will lose access to Korean media.
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It's not only Korean, but any foreign media. I suppose this could be a good thing too, since it'll push people to pick up extra languages.
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I guess I just don't care enough about K-Pop to learn a whole new language just to understand the lyrics.
Besides, I have trouble enough understanding some lyrics in my native language - surely K-Pop suffers the same problem.
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People say the same thing about foreign language video games and movies. Until it becomes politicized/socjus'd to the point that all meaning is fully lost, and it's become the pulpit for some special interest group. Then people start picking up the language. See the BS surrounding localizers with JP media(light novels, manga, anime, video games). To make a point, 20-40% of all non-translated LN, anime and manga are sold directly out of country to the foreign market.
To be fair, I speak/read/write English
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You can't politicize kpop. Try, and see what happens.
Pick 10 random kpop songs, and read translations of the lyrics. You'll see.
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Hahaha. You can politicize anything, why not take a look at the great list of things which are a feminist issue. When you get to pencils, and paring knives, you'll understand where your naivete went.
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No, actually I think about feminist issues all the time and you're just throwing that in because you're jealous of kpop.
Feminism has no troubles in kpop, because all participants are required to hold up Cuteness as the ultimate Virtue. Man or woman, fan or idol, you must value Cuteness. Kinda hard to be a misogynistic blowhard while being cute. So they don't have this problem. Lots of other problems they don't have too, because you can't be cute while having it. If you want to be triggered, you'll have to c
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They can still have fan made subtitles, the uploader of the video just has to manually add them. It would be nice if they kept some way of submit subtitles and easily add them to reduce the workload.
Basically it looks like they are just trying to make uploaders do the moderation for them because their automated abuse/spam filters don't work.
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That's exactly it, without a way to submit them, they won't happen. The way it is now, the upload the videos with no subs, and then after community subs get added, they edit the title to say "EngSub". Minimal work.
Kpop stars sell almost no albums. Most content is free. They make their money from television appearances, and who gets invited depends on the charts. Because of this dynamic, international fans have reduced monetary value, and the subtitles exist only because the international fans add them.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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For how-to videos you can use the automated captions. These days they are as accurate or better than human made captions on anything with half decent audio.
Seriously it's really impressive how good they are now, when you compare older videos to current ones and when you look at how they cope with things like proper nouns. In related news Google Translate can read my awful handwriting too now.
SAP in Espanol? (Score:3)
This reminds me of the early efforts to get Spanish translation into the SAP channel of American TV channels... the crew doing that frequently went off topic back then. There were so few listeners, that the violations were hard to detect.
So, YouTube wants paid caption writers, not an unaccountable community.
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So, YouTube wants paid caption writers
Don't get ahead of yourself. YouTube just wants to throw accountability at the video uploader.
100% false (Score:4, Informative)
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If you upload a 15 minute video, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to review the automatic closed captions, edit the text, and publish. For most videos posted on Youtube, ad
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Basically nobody was against this.
I bet you were watching an English video.
In other news no ever used Google Reader right? I mean no one commented on the CNN article, so I imagine the announcement that they canned it would have attracted zero negativity on Slashdot too right?
Why not let creator chose? (Score:2)
Why not let the creator of the youtube video chose whether to allow community captioning? Or have the creator check the captions before publishing them?
Re:Why not let creator chose? (Score:5, Informative)
It's already been that way for a long time. Community captions was an option that the channel owners had to explicitly turn on, and I know plenty of channels that did with no problems. I've done plenty of translations for various channels I watch.
But... heaven forbid a channel have control over their own content! As I've found in my own stint with administrating BBSes, moderation problems are almost a problem with the platform tools, not the creators or community.
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So the whole thing was opt-in to begin with? FFS.
I'd actually take that away: Community subs can be submitted, but must be approved by video's user. Only auto-approve if left in queue limbo for X months.
MBA logic at its finest (Score:2)
"We need a reason for doing this thing that nobody will like us doing"
"Well, if something is rarely used, the way to get people to use it more is to turn it into a paid service, right?"
"Perfect! Nobody will suspect a thing!"
How bout ending those panels at the end of videos? (Score:2)
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