[deadmutex]

I am not sure, but the screenshot I submitted seems to be the default settings.

However, software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write, and if you think there's a systematic issue, please file a bug, so it can help others in same situation.

[DonHopkins]

I am absolutely sure I never changed my settings, and that they have changed over time without me doing anything. Why would anyone want 50% font size at 25% opacity on a yellow then green background? I didn't ask for that. Yes, this is most definitely a systematic issue.

The bug reports I've submitted to google have been ignored, and that's a frustrating distraction from what I'm paid to do. Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users.

[saurik]

> Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users.

FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to determine whether or not you've used their bug tracker in the past (or even filed a bug already for this specific issue).

When I find someone on a forum with a bug that I haven't heard about, I sit around and talk to them until they either get tired of wanting to talk to me or I get the information I need to fix the problem. The alternative would essentially translate to "I don't actually care about this bug", as that's the only way you are going to get certain classes of bug report. I have shown people at Apple bugs that they were absolutely fascinated by momentarily and then told "File a Radar". I clearly wasn't in a position to do at the moment and which of course I forgot to do it when I got home... they should know this happens, because this assuredly happens to almost every single person they tell that to (and no, "well, we do see a large number of bugs filed" is not evidence against "people you tell to file a bug using your arcane system, particularly if they have to do it days later, probably won't"), and yet even when a potentially rare and real and critical bug is shown to them in person (this was even at an event where the whole point was to work with customers on their issues), their response is easentially "engh, I don't care if this doesn't work unless it affects a ton of people". As someone who works in security, I'm going to assert "do you want vulnerabilities? because this attitude is how you get vulnerabilities": every bug is precious as it is a mistake in your mental model of the software, and who knows how far down the rabbit hole that mistake will take you.

Sure: I realize that the engineer isn't always the best person to do this, and even in my tiny company I had to solve that, but the solution isn't to tell people to "go use the bug tracker", a comment which shunts annoying work learning a new system, one which is all too likely to demoralize them (Apple's Radar is a great example of this), but instead to have someone whose job is to talk to people to follow up with credible bugs: I'd go "hey Xyz, there's a guy on this forum who's complaining about something I hadn't heard of before; can you try to get more details from them?" (where Xyz has changed over the years, but has always been one of the few key positions). I couldn't begin to count the number of times I have debugged an issue with someone on reddit.

[DonHopkins]

The rule of thumb I used was: if Google is paying someone enough to go online and post defenses of youtube like "Please do not spread falsehoods", and tell me things I already know like "software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write," then part of his paid job should also be filing bug reports using the bug tracking system he uses every day, and probably already has an account logged in and a tab opened on, when the falsehoods turn out to be true.

If YouTube were open source, and I could look at the source code of the keyboard handler to find the cause of the problem myself, prove my bad experience was not just a falsehood to be brushed off, and possibly even suggest a fix, then maybe I would have been more motivated to put my own time into filing a bug report.

But Google is a huge well funded advertising company that payed billions of dollars for YouTube and makes billions of dollars off of it, has a huge complex system set up for digital rights management, promoting and paying for advertisements, enabling copyright holders to report violations, paying many employees for actively pursuing and resolving those copyright violations, removing inappropriate content, hiring conservative lobbyists and sending executives to kiss Donald Trump's ring [1], etc.

So I would expect YouTube employees to put at least as much time and effort into reporting bugs about their own product to their employer, as they put into monetizing YouTube while defending its reputation from people they perceive as spreading falsehoods about it.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-google-idUSKBN14...

[deadmutex]

I am not getting paid to do this, and actually am taking some time to be with the family for holidays. I just saw the original comment saying that YT "fuck(s) it up" when it comes to CC, and it looked OK to me. So, I just wanted to share my results so that people do not assume "it's screwed up everywhere". I do know that the engineers I have met at work really want to try to do the right thing for users.

I don't have access to file a bug through a work account for the next few days, and if you come across any issues (like CC broken by default), please file a bug with a lot of details. People do look at that stuff. I am glad that you found the source of the issue, and I hope you can agree that it would've been impossible to find it if I had just filed a bug. I do not work anywhere close to the team that implemented the CC, and when people have said "file a bug" to me in a work context, they have meant it as a way to "let's keep track of this so it's not forgotten". Luckily, the people I have met at work have been good about this. I do not speak for Google or anyone else there, just sharing my own personal experience.

[DonHopkins]

Thanks for responding. I'll submit a bug if I can, now that I know the cause the problem. But I need to know where best to submit it.

It's a design and documentation bug, that needs to be addressed at a higher level by re-evaluating the decisions and justifications behind all the keyboard accelerators, removing the ones that nobody actually uses and that cause more problems than they solve (like making closed captioned text transparent and changing its colors), implementing full and immediate "?" keyboard help, and writing some online documentation.

So should I simply click "send feedback" on any random youtube video and write up my suggestions, as this page tells me to? [1] I've done that now, so let's see what happens.

Do you really sincerely think my suggestion will actually make it back to the designers through that channel and that changes will happen as a result? Is there a way for me to track it?

Or is there a better accountable bug tracking system that I can actually submit a real trackable bug into and watch the progress and see if it gets marked "will not fix", like https://bugs.chromium.org but for youtube? Do you have access to a better bug tracking system for youtube that's not public?

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4347644?hl=en

[deadmutex]

Unfortunately, I don't work close to the team that implemented the CC system, nor do I know the language it is implemented in very well. And, I do not have access to my work account for a few days (I am taking some time off to be with family), so I can't file a bug with my work account either. It seems like the problem has been resolved, and it was tracked down to the owner's cat.

Luckily, at YT, I have not met anyone that said "file a bug report" and meant "fuck off". I have worked with some people in the past at a different company that have meant that, but not here. Usually it has meant "let's file a bug to not forget about it", this is just my experience, and I just wanted to share it. I am only speaking for myself, and others might have different experiences.