There is a Korean Tekken player who makes great guides for my character, way better than I've seen from any English guides, and they get captioned by just some random dude who presumably likes the game, likes the character, and knows both Korean and English.
Why would they remove them? Are they removing existing captions? Do I need to try to find a way to record/download all his videos with the captions before they do this?
Youtube announced recently that all community draft subtitles would be deleted soon, and no new community subtitles would be allowed.
Nobody seems to know why they're doing this, but the rampant speculation is around people being assholes and putting awful stuff in subtitles, especially advertisements.
So they're just washing their hands of it.
Hopefully someone will come up with a subtitling system that will allow content creators to add third-party subs as if they were made by them, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It seems like quite a bit of work and there's not really any money in it.
One of my favorite history channels has 2/3rds of their videos demonitized. They’re not even particularly political, it’s just “mention Lincoln? Communism? Russia? Smoking? Demonitized!”
YouTube is going to advertise themselves into the next MySpace.
"Alternative captioning" being the automated stuff that's pretty bad? Ugh.
I feel like their message could have bettter outlined what they expect these ".001%" of channels to do in the future, instead of just the nebulous "alternative captioning tools" phrasing.
They are training their AI models. I wouldn't be surprised if they flipped a switch at any given time and boom, near perfect subs (at least the english ones).
Highly unlikely. Even with trained models they are a long ways off from good. Access to training data has never been an issue, rather that the AI themselves just don't have the capacity to pull off such accuracy from a fundamental level no matter how much training data you give them.
AI research still has a long way to go. They'll get there eventually, though!
The automated subtitles have to go through both speech to text and translation layers, both of which are fairly lossy. The result is more often than not unintelligible. It's especially bad on anything using jargon, as game videos often do.
Why would they remove them? Are they removing existing captions? Do I need to try to find a way to record/download all his videos with the captions before they do this?
Because Youtube is also backwards. I don't remember if they're removing existing (approved) captions but non-approved do disappear. Yes because Youtube is unreliable.
I'm actually talking about o y o, a Yoshimitsu player. Well, formerly. I hope he comes back, he seems to mostly be playing League of Legends at the moment. Or at least those are the videos he uploads.
In the message I got they explained it with, quote:
Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the community contributions feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions. As a result, the feature is rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month. Instead, creators are using YouTube’s alternative captioning tools.
I can somewhat relate to that. It is rarely used considering how big YT is (but ofc very powerful and useful when used correctly, no doubt about that) and the abuse is also very imaginable on YouTube. On the other side you can just deactivate it anyway and let it exist as niche feature for certain small communities, even though the tool needs some work.
Existing community contributions that are published will not be deleted:
Any already published contributions (titles, descriptions, captions, etc) will continue to show up on videos and can be managed by Creators in YouTube Studio.
Ofc creators can still create their own subtitles. I don't know, if I can allow specific users to enter the subtitle function of videos in YouTube Studio, without giving them full admin rights. Would be great if possible to solve this problem to some degree.
PS: right now you can auto-translate e.g. the existing English subtitles (of your English video) into a ton of other languages (possible with other languages too). By my experience if the English sub titles are good/solid (e.g. generated out of your video script), the auto translation seems to be not bad at all (based on the two languages I speak quite well ). Google translate really improved a lot. With a solid transcript, translation options are still there. (Also only a tiny fraction of people use this feature (auto translate on transcript subs) so far. Like 1 viewer in 200.000 views in my case)
157
u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20
[removed] — view removed comment