YouTube Celebrates Deaf Awareness Week By Killing Crowd-Sourced Captions (arstechnica.com) 41
Two days after the International Week of the Deaf, which is the last full week in September, YouTube is killing its "Community Contributions" feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. Ars Technica reports: Once enabled by a channel owner, the Community Contributions feature would let viewers caption or translate a video and submit it to the channel for approval. YouTube currently offers machine-transcribed subtitles that are often full of errors, and if you also need YouTube to take a second pass at the subtitles for machine translation, they've probably lost all meaning by the time they hit your screen. The Community Caption feature would load up those machine-written subtitles as a starting point and allow the user to make corrections and add text that the machine transcription doesn't handle well, like transcribed sound cues for the deaf and hard of hearing.
YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. "While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators," the company wrote, "it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse." The community does not seem to agree with this assessment, since a petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. "Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience," the petition reads. "Community captions ensured that many videos were accessible that otherwise would not be."
Instead of the free, in-house solution YouTube already built and doesn't want to keep running, the company's shutdown post pushes users to paid, third-party alternatives like Amara.org. YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions," (what happened to the low usage?) "YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."
YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. "While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators," the company wrote, "it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse." The community does not seem to agree with this assessment, since a petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. "Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience," the petition reads. "Community captions ensured that many videos were accessible that otherwise would not be."
Instead of the free, in-house solution YouTube already built and doesn't want to keep running, the company's shutdown post pushes users to paid, third-party alternatives like Amara.org. YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions," (what happened to the low usage?) "YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."
Somewhere at google (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Somewhere at google (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by a desire for profit.
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Sufficiently strong desire for money is indistinguishable from malice.
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It's going to be pretty hard for Google to do this without being 10 days away from *some* date important to the deaf. They could be 10 days away from Deaf Awareness Week. They could also be 10 days away from the birth or death of some important deaf person, or 10 days away from the birth or death of the inventor of sign language, or 10 days away from the founding of some institute important to the deaf, or perhaps 10 days away from the anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities act.
Each of those dates
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That's a pretty fucking stupid casus belli to get rid of community contributions.
Did you read the summary? Google isn't doing it "just because". They are doing it because they will profit from the paid alternative.
Re:Just Because? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you read the summary? Google isn't doing it "just because". They are doing it because they will profit from the paid alternative.
You mean Amara.org? As far as I can tell, it is not owned by Google but rather by a non-profit organization. It doesn't look like Google stands to make any profit off of it.
Re: Just Because? (Score:1)
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They are google. You think they didnâ(TM)t negotiate a cut for handing Amara their user base while killing the free option?
Do you have any source for that, or is it just a conspiracy theory?
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I use the auto-generated subtitles most of the time (not deaf, just somewhat hard of hearing), and I find them super-helpful, because even though they have quite a few errors the word it picks is usually close enough you can figure out what it should have been.
That said the subtitles always say they are auto-generated so apparently crowd-sourced captions hardly ever actually happ
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Unfortunately for those using youtube to host things for education, or point to things others have posted for education or really anything affected by the ADA (or similar country appropriate legislation) the 95% accuracy that the autogenerated stuff is doing isn't good enough. So in theory, the instructor/institution they work for is still on the hook for providing a "full transcription".
Re: Just Because? (Score:5, Insightful)
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OMG Conspiracy! Actually they are doing it due to a proliferation of horrid spam and abusive text laid over videos that bypass Youtube's usual content review systems.
time for an ADA lawsuit? (Score:2)
time for an ADA lawsuit?
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I hope so since I can't hear well too. :(
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If you want to get an idea of the poor state of captions, pick three videos, turn off the sound and try to understand the content using only the captions. Appalling, right?
If you post a 10 minute video, it probably takes an ext
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If you upload a 10 minute video, it'll take five minutes before you even have the auto-generated captions open in your editor, because you have to wait for the video to process and then find and download the file and open it up. If they're anything like Google Translate, it's quicker to do it yourself from scratch than to clean up the automatic version. I reckon you'd really be adding 40 minutes to a
Not used because it's a hidden feature (Score:5, Insightful)
I never saw any option to edit subtitles, so I expect this is true for everyone else. If you hide a feature then of course no-one is going to use it. I even saw a couple of wrong subs and thought I'd like to had fixed it but had no idea how. Editing subs should be quick, easy and obvious as to how. Is this one of those stupid hidden catch 22 interfaces where you have to know what buttons to press to get it to work like a cheat code to a game?
Youtube should have pulled their finger out and fixed the feature so that it works right, canning the feature is pure laziness. I seriously hope I don't become deaf when this is the pathetic level of effort out there.
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Click the three dots and click add translation and select English. It even defaulted to providing the auto-generated English so you didn't need to start from scratch. This wasn't "hidden" in any way.
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Thanks - I wouldn't have thought to look for adding English subtitles to an English video under "Add translation", but I guess that shows the limits of my imagination. :-)
What I get when I try that today is: "The video you requested isn't enabled for community contribution. Here are some other videos that could use your help: We don't have any suggested videos right now. Check again later."
If it comes back in the future, though, that'll be good to know. Thanks - I mean that.
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Doesn't change the fact that instead of trying to implement some kind of trust system they just gave up.
Initial Scoring metrics:
Is editor account new?
In regular normal use?
With low frequency of complaints?
Continuous rolling scoring metric:
Have users edits been reversed?
Does the edit agree with other edits?
Put a complaint system on edits. Have users edits rec'd complaints?
Heuristics:
Are edits repetitive? Are edits wildly out of synch with initial text - very different length etc.
Moderation system:
Allow chann
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Do mean on your own videos? Subtitles are a top level menu option in Dashboard. Subttitles->click on the video->mouse over the auto-generated subtitle and click on the 3 dots at the right and then Edit on Classic Studio. At some point that will change when they eventually migrate editing subs to the new Studio platform.
If you're talking about editing them on someone else's video through community contributions, that was something the video uploader has to enable and well there's not much point in l
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that was something the video uploader has to enable
Technically it was something the uploader had to *disable*. It was opt-out.
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I never saw any option to edit subtitles, so I expect this is true for everyone else.
You never clicked the 3 dots next to the video and "clicked add translation"? There's nothing hidden about it. It's right there in the menu of every video without captions expressly disabled.
What more do you propose? A size 72 font banner at the top of the screen? A popup teaching everyone how to use Youtube every time they visit? A 15min how-to induction video before you're allowed to watch youtube videos?
Re:Not used because it's a hidden feature (Score:4, Informative)
"Translation" is the process of translating words from one language to another. "Add translation" is not where I'd look if I wanted to correct poorly auto-transcribed speech.
Or is this one of those "words mean exactly what I want them to mean" moments where we're all supposed to dumb ourselves down to the level of the Google devs and accept imprecise language because they don't know any better?
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I'm pretty sure it's used quite a bit. I watch a lot of channels that are in my native language, which is spoken by only about 20-30 million people. Several of those channels have a vibrant community of translators providing captions in different languages. Channels like these will likely lose a vast amount of their audience without those captions...
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I did quite a few captions for videos a couple years ago. As long as content creators enabled the feature on their channel it was available. There were a few other channels where I asked if they wanted captions, but they were uncomfortable with the idea of enabling community captions.
The only thing that sucked about the feature was that YouTube turned it into yet another social game. The people who did the latest edits to the captions got all the credit (several names could be listed, but the list was li
You don't hear about success (Score:4)
This is a common problem with engineering. You only hear about the problems, not the successes. Particularly if that success doesn't seem to impact the bottom line. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Though I'm sure Youtube could quantify the ad revenue from people with captions turned on, and compare that to the support burden of spam etc. Obviously they don't believe the feature is worth the support cost.
AI ghost (Score:1)
Is it dreaming too?
talk about.. (Score:2)
You can still have third party captions (Score:2)
They just need to be on another site.
You could link the sites using a user script.
You could download the videos with one of many downloaders (I use youtube-dl) and then apply the subtitle file.
Yeah it's a PITA, but in the bargain you get to dodge ads