YouTube News Official info on community caption deprecation

[Tito Tim]

The Creators Insiders channel just released some news on the deprecation of community captions. He explains it well (but from the comments it is obvious people do not pay attention). YT will be removing the anonymous community captions. They will be adding a system to allow a 'trusted user' caption authority on your channel. Also, while that system is being made, YT will pay for people's account on a 3rd party caption creation site. Also, they are working to improve the creator caption editor.

My thoughts:
I cannot believe anyone allowed anonymous captions on their channel. As the creator we are responsible for the content on our channel. I like the 'trusted user' idea, but even then I would run it through google translate just to double check it. I am still responsible for the content... I have used the caption editor and it was clunky, to say the least. I ended up downloaded the automated caption and editing in Word, then reuploading it. Eventually I just started trying to speak clearer and let the automated system do its thing. I had virtually no caption use, and it was too much work, for under 3% of my views. I hope they make some good improvements on the editor, and I really think the trusted user addition is good.

View: https://youtu.be/DPYsu5nz3ts

 

[kitchen c/o ammama]

Thank you for the news. I did not know that something like " anonymous community captions " existed.

 

[Tito Tim]

From the comments it seems people are irate that they are taking them away. I am shocked anyone used them. I had not heard of them either.

But they are not taking them away, just making them not anonymous - a huge improvement I would say.

 

[SILTHW]

Its interesting that right after I your post and the video I saw a huge thread on Reddit that was pretty much full of misinformation on this.

Someone posted a link that showed where people were using anonymous user-created captions to maliciously advertise other channels and services. Evidently it was a much bigger problem than most of us realized.

 

[TubeBuddy]

The Creators Insiders channel just released some news on the deprecation of community captions. He explains it well (but from the comments it is obvious people do not pay attention). YT will be removing the anonymous community captions. They will be adding a system to allow a 'trusted user' caption authority on your channel. Also, while that system is being made, YT will pay for people's account on a 3rd party caption creation site. Also, they are working to improve the creator caption editor.

My thoughts:
I cannot believe anyone allowed anonymous captions on their channel. As the creator we are responsible for the content on our channel. I like the 'trusted user' idea, but even then I would run it through google translate just to double check it. I am still responsible for the content... I have used the caption editor and it was clunky, to say the least. I ended up downloaded the automated caption and editing in Word, then reuploading it. Eventually I just started trying to speak clearer and let the automated system do its thing. I had virtually no caption use, and it was too much work, for under 3% of my views. I hope they make some good improvements on the editor, and I really think the trusted user addition is good.

View: https://youtu.be/DPYsu5nz3ts

I have two thoughts. We had a lot of people do it for the goodness of their hearts and they actually did a great job in translation. The other thing is the communities that needed them REALLY benefited. It's always up to the creator for quality control IMO, but I wish their was a better way.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

they had talked about this a while back. Personally im happy to see it happen and i have very little to add beyond anything Tito Tom said. I never once heard a single horror story about bad captions and i know there are some really generous people out there doing this, but it would be such a monumental oversight if someone were to go in and enter captions that could get you in trouble, and it is such a hard thing to double check.

 

[TubeBuddy]

they had talked about this a while back. Personally im happy to see it happen and i have very little to add beyond anything Tito Tom said. I never once heard a single horror story about bad captions and i know there are some really generous people out there doing this, but it would be such a monumental oversight if someone were to go in and enter captions that could get you in trouble, and it is such a hard thing to double check.

They only could do that if YOU accepted them though. That's not necessarily what happened. If YOU as the creator didn't vet the captions I think that's on you. (Not saying YOU specifically haha)

 

[Ikerot]

I certainly like the idea of trusted users for captions. Does that mean we still (kinda) have community contribution?

Oh, I wonder how the caption integration with the uploader will go.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

They only could do that if YOU accepted them though. That's not necessarily what happened. If YOU as the creator didn't vet the captions I think that's on you. (Not saying YOU specifically haha)

Yeah you know this is a symptom of what i see as the bigger picture. I never even considered community contributions, and had no idea i even had the ability to vet captions. I felt this way about poll cards as well; there was nothing wrong with poll cards. They were just hard to check. But that never seemed to come up in conversation when they decided to deprecate those.

 

[Beanie Draws]

From the comments it seems people are irate that they are taking them away. I am shocked anyone used them. I had not heard of them either.

But they are not taking them away, just making them not anonymous - a huge improvement I would say.

The problem here is the classic, and reoccurring case of miscommunication and poor delivery of the message. It seems YouTube announced plans, before consulting the community on these plans, they just made the decision for us (which seems to be a common thread with YouTube over the years)

And yeah, it was an underused feature, because many people didn't know the feature existed! You can only know a feature exists, if you make it obvious and promote it. Some features are hard to find (especially in terms of community captions, and series playlists) heck, people didn't know that end cards were moved into the editor section. these features were hidden in user unfriendly menus, and naturally they were VERY underutilized.

PewDiePie was about the only creator I knew who used them, because he'd put the credits of his captioning in his descriptions, and he'd have community supplied captions for several languages. A channel with at the time, over 50 million subscribers, and millions of views per video kind of needed that. BUT the problem here was that people could troll and add their lines in the captions, and it was up to the creator to review each caption (hard to do if it's a translation) and would have to manually review EVERY caption, for EVERY video, and if you do that for 5 languages, per day, every day... that's time consuming, so it comes to an element of trust, and trusting that people aren't trolling.

Some would quietly troll and it would only become an issue to some, and that was only really around a few creators, so if something isn't a huge issue and only to a few, it will only be a blimp on the radar, and at the time YouTube had bigger issues to deal with like Elsagate, Logan Paul, and whatever controversies Pewds was getting himself into... so trolls in the community captions which only 1% of people knew about anyway, is a very small blimp. More like one ant biting in a field of ants just minding their own business. You don't notice the one ant until it bites enough times for it to be annoying. So I don't see it as having been a BIG issue, but it did obviously take years for it to get to this point.


Captions up until now (i still have old captions it seems, at least in drafts) is still stuck in studio classic, just like playlists. Playlists and captions seem to be the last to be moved over to new studio, which is why the "little used" features (poorly advertised and communicated hidden deep within settings that few knew about anyway) were advertised as being moved over.

Of course, people didn't know that much about these features, so when YouTube announced removing features they hardly knew about, they focused on the CORE part "YOUTUBE IS TAKING AWAY CAPTIONS?!?!?!" "YOUTUBE IS TAKING AWAY PLAYLISTS???" and it's a classic case of miscommunication for a poorly implemented decision that obviously wasn't communicated very well beyond a small announcement in a tweet that confused many, and now they have to explain what is happening and why, when they really should have handed the why BEFORE people could have a chance to misinterpret things.

It's a classic error that I've watched YouTube repeat for years and I'm used to it now. but I'm glad they're explaining it more now, and MAYBE people might finally start using the features they didn't really know or understand in the first place now that they've finally been given some attention instead of being the last thing left in the "to do" pile.

 

[Beanie Draws]

They only could do that if YOU accepted them though. That's not necessarily what happened. If YOU as the creator didn't vet the captions I think that's on you. (Not saying YOU specifically haha)

It's difficult to vet captions for languages you don't understand and just have to have faith that the caption translations are correct and not trolls. Look at what Pewds had.

37 languages (I assume most of them were community captions)

37 selectable languages, none of them automated, for a channel that at the time had 50 millions subscribers, is both I guess, expected or at least a good example of what massive channels SHOULD be doing, and impressive. I guess HOPING to be able to serve 37 languages is a great way to allow multiple languages to enjoy your content, but also puts you at massive risk of abuse if you can't vet that amount of languages... and during the time when he was going for the 100 million, people started abusing that trust and he had to stop providing that level of captioning.

This is how his captioning credits USED to work, so I guess a portion of those 37 languages were anonymous.

And it seemed like he was the only one providing them to this level.

It's going to be interesting to see how, or if, the new evolution of captioning and captioning permissions are going to be used. Definitely won't be as many languages available.

 

[Tito Tim]

It's difficult to vet captions for languages you don't understand and just have to have faith that the caption translations are correct and not trolls.

It is difficult to vet other languages but I would at least run it through google translate to see if it is close (yeah, google translate needs improvement too). We are responsible for what is on our channels and I would never let anyone anonymously put anything on my channel.

 

[Beanie Draws]

It is difficult to vet other languages but I would at least run it through google translate to see if it is close (yeah, google translate needs improvement too). We are responsible for what is on our channels and I would never let anyone anonymously put anything on my channel.

It depends how you copy and paste the languages into google translate, because captions come in sections and that can take forever to manually copy and past each sentence into translate. I wouldn't let anyone anonymously put captions on, but it was a nice idea at the time.

 

[SILTHW]

What I like about Rev is the quality control they have, but it is expensive. I'm a fan of paying people a fair wage for their work, but $7 a minute for certain languages is crazy. The upside is you get the original language captions as well and they seem to be dead on.

It feels like there is a market gap between anonymous user-generated captions and services like Rev. Hope something shows up in that space. Everyone I know working in the space still feels we are 2-3 years away from AI being able to do the translations well.

 

[Beanie Draws]

so out of curiosity, does ANYONE here have the ability to edit captions without being taken to studio classic? I'm really curious to see what caption editing will be like in new studio seems they've alluded to it being ready to ship to new studio

What I like about Rev is the quality control they have, but it is expensive. I'm a fan of paying people a fair wage for their work, but $7 a minute for certain languages is crazy. The upside is you get the original language captions as well and they seem to be dead on.

Agreed. $7 a minute, when you multiply it by 60 that's $420 per hour, is more than most senior graphic designer make at $42 an hour supposedly. $67 is the high end of being an art director. I have actually never really heard of a position paying anywhere near that amount, maybe a top level CEO... but for translation... that's pretty interesting.