[taneq]

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).

[Mithaldu]

"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.

[taneq]

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.

[anyfoo]

I don't know why you got downvoted so much, I share the same experience.

[Mithaldu]

I expect it's a side effect from casual youtube users who've mostly experienced abuse of the feature and think i'm lying.