[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