[nindalf]

> I don’t think this functionality was as little used

Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

> Clearly more options exist for managing spam

Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just ...” without realising that the approach would have poor precision/recall at scale. Any hard coded rule would probably rot. Building a classifier to detect this abuse would be tricky considering it’s low prevalence and that ML was doing a poor job of captioning in the first place (nothing to compare it to).

Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?

[iforgotpassword]

> We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand.

If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot of views.

I'm subscribed to about 100 channels with many of them making high quality videos about different topics that required research, have animations for explanation or otherwise took effort to make. These often times do have subtitles in different languages and I'd consider that pretty valuable. Throwing those in a bucket with TikTok compilations when evaluating the usage of community translations or subtitles in general is just nonsense.

[nindalf]

Clearly they need some method of prioritizing their work. HN would have you believe that every product and every feature should be supported till the end of time, regardless of whether it's used or not. In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

> I'm subscribed to about 100 channels

How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles? Note that even if you used subtitles, those could have been auto-generated.

[iforgotpassword]

> How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles?

Almost never, since all the content I consume is in English. But several channels made posts about that upcoming change and there was quite some feedback by people depending on this (as far as I could tell, especially the Spanish speaking community).

> In practice, in the real world, features that have few takers are removed because the maintenance burden doesn't justify the benefit.

By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too, since the number of viewers actually relying on them is a minority, and maintaining it probably takes some effort too.

I think community generated subtitles, just like regular subtitles on TV, enable people to access information (or entertainment) they otherwise couldn't. There should be a better measure for its value than just how much effort it takes to maintain that functionality vs the number of users, otherwise there would be little reason for any kind of barrier-free technology or efforts really.

[nindalf]

So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

> By that measure, traditional TV stations better scrap subtitles too,

You made an implicit assumptions that TV subtitles and Youtube community contributed subtitles are used by the same proportion of people. That's almost certainly wrong. And remember, Youtube auto generated subtitles still exist for all videos.

Look I don't work for Google, but it pains me when I see a thread full of people shitting on them without any basis in fact.

Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.

[iforgotpassword]

> So just to be clear, any project that improves accessibility can never be shut down for any reason under any circumstances? That's a pretty hard stance to take.

You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage between users creating subtitles and creators assigning them to their videos. And then you mention auto-generated subtitles like this is something trivial that just works. Compared to everything else that is required to run a platform like YouTube, community generated subtitles pale in comparison.

> Here's a radical idea - we trust the people working on these things to take a call on it.

Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind? Never did the quality of a product suffer because corners were cut in order to save a few cents during production. Trusting a company like Google. A radical idea indeed.

[nindalf]

> You make it sound like this feature costs a significant amount of resources and maintenance work. It's simple brokerage

Yes. This right here. This is typical HN. You have absolutely no idea about what it takes to build or police this feature. You have no data about how much this feature is used and abused and by who. Without knowing anything you are confidently asserting that it costs very little to maintain this feature.

I'd ask you to reconsider this approach but tbh, this is the easiest way to farm upvotes on HN. So you do you.

> Yes, because when didn't profit oriented companies only want the best for mankind

I trust them a lot more than people who speak authoritatively while knowing very little.

[CydeWeys]

> How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles?

I suspect the answer to this question is entirely dependent on whether you speak English. If you don't speak English (and the person you're responding to obviously does), then you're reliant on subtitles regardless of source, unless you only stick to videos in your native language.

[vosper]

> Another day, another top HN comment that confidently presents opinion as fact. Would it kill folks to be a little less confident?

Apart from the last statement "Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether." the person you replied you was obviously stating their opinions, and not claiming them to be facts.

> "an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me"

> I don't think this functionality was as little-used

Emphasis mine, in both cases.

As for the final statement, which is presented as fact, I think it probably is factually accurate that there are more possible options for YouTube than shutting the feature down.

[bambax]

"little used" is a stupid argument from YT. It may be little used on a global scale but vital to some specific groups.

By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.

[nindalf]

Every feature is useful for some specific group out there. Doesn't mean it needs to remain supported. Here's an example - Youtube used to allow clickable links inside the video. Now it doesn't. That affected many channels, especially those that implemented their own "more like this" feature manually.

You have to make hard choices sometimes. If this is a feature that only a tiny minority cares about, then the team has to pull the plug on it.

[int_19h]

With subtitles, the obvious solution is to not show them by default, even if the user has the corresponding language selected by default for subtitles in general. The net result would be the same as with this change, except that those of us who rely on community-submitted subtitles would still be able to use them (at the risk of seeing spam occasionally - but it's better than no risk and no feature).

[DarkWiiPlayer]

I think the point is that google wants to save resources aka. put employees to work on something else.

[dntrkv]

Amen. How can you make claims like that so confidently? How can you think you know better about something than the team that built it and/or works on it for a living? Imagine someone making these claims about a product you work on. "You should add feature X. Everyone will use it." No, we've tried that beforę and only a tiny subset of users actually used it and it's a massive bitch to maintain.