Seriously, good riddance. It added so much clutter to videos that I explicitly hid them any chance I got. I'd rather content creators just use the video description to communicate or edit their videos so that annotations would not be necessary.
So you read the entire description of a video before watching it and remember every word of it, including timestamps with comments to note corrections, even when there's 10 of them for a half hour video?
Annotations (in the sense of small snippets of text that display briefly to add info) are fine. What YouTube had in many cases was a poorly implemented MySpace page overlaid on the video. And as one of the parent posters said, the setting just kept turning itself back on no matter how many times you turned it off (on the video, or in your settings page).
"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video.
In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too.
And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with their youtube videos providing corrections and such via the description is entirely untenable.
I'm sorry you've only seen spam, but cutting off another's tool because some people can't use it correctly is a severe case of FYGM.
I don't really have a "set of youtubers" that I follow and so most of the stuff I watch is from random sources. I think you're right that it depends hugely on who you're watching - random hobby / extreme sports videos seem to be particularly bad, but technical and engineering videos are usually fine.
I don't think they should take it away completely, just limit it so avoid the aforementioned 'myspace page' overuse.
You can add "cards", i.e. the popups in the top right that show a short text and an "i" button. Those can be links to videos, polls, or external links (if you're a big youtuber). However the text is limited, you can't set how long it shows, and you can have a maximum of 5. You can maybe use subtitles too, but you cannot set a default subtitle for your video.
So there are hacky half-working workarounds, but otherwise youtube just told everyone who cares about their videos to go and kindly get fucked.
Who said anything about editing errors? I am talking about things like exploratory engineering videos, where the creator is speculating about certain things that get apparent only after the video has been uploaded, sometimes with the help of viewers.
It is for example not uncommon in teardown, some done by leading engineers in their entire field, to find out what some proprietarily marked chip is a few days after the fact. This is not a “fuck up”.
Reediting and reuploading a video just to change a single (but possibly important) detail is not only a colossal waste of time and effort that could be better spent on other videos, as far as I know it will also present itself as a new video.