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by jakobegger 2758 days ago
Annotations are a quick and dirty fix that isn't really a fix at all.

It's really confusing if the voice in the video says one thing, and an annotation is displayed that says "this is not actually correct ..."

It would be much better if the video creator spent five minutes to actually fix the video and reupload it.

8 comments

Aside from the other comments (which are all relevant), it's often not 'five minutes' to make a change like that - some of my (fairly simple) videos take longer than that just to render, aside from actually making the edit in the first place. Annotations offered a quick, easy and universal way to put on screen corrections in place,without loads of work and without losing view count, comments or fragmentation. That's no longer available.
Creators are strongly disincentivised from doing that since deleting the old version would throw away their views etc for that video. It would also delete comments, and while this is often no great loss, I do run across useful or interesting YouTube comments sometimes.
They don't need to delete the old version, they can link between new/old version in the description.
That sounds like a solution I'd personally never even notice. Most of the devices I consume youtube videos on either do not show the video description at all (TV) or actively disencourage reading it (the official Android app currently requires one or two clicks to even see it).

In addition to that, re-uploads are annoying enough as is because content creators constantly need to upload old content due to changes in Youtubes policies or enforcement. New revisions for any minor mistake instead of an overlay would properly ruin the subscription page imho.

This still fragments your audience.
This would be far more confusing than an annotation.
> It's really confusing if the voice in the video says one thing, and an annotation is displayed that says "this is not actually correct ..."

I think you would have to try quite hard to be confused about something like this. Also, frequently used for self deprecation comedy.

They would have to upload it to a new URL and so none of the links to the old video would see it anyway, which is kind of useless.
I always found this satisfying in a strange way, especially on technical videos. Perhaps it raises my confidence even more on a video if time is taken to correct a statement inline with the time it is being said.
so google prefers to throw that content away? that is entirely disrespectful of their content creators. I bet a massive number of youtubers can no longer edit their videos because they no longer have them.
Then you loose/cut off all previous comments/views/likes
That would reset the views and comments.