[vintermann]

I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".

[bmn__]

What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.

If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.

[clan]

So what you're saying: Please complain through proper channels and hope they accept your input?

Or should he just keep using the signals he gets and immediately clean up his feed?

I actually see this as a feature. YouTube recommends a lot of garbage. I suggested that they improved my feed but they implemented this signal instead. I use the exactly this method to weed out a lot of content I do not care for.

You cannot tell the 500 pound gorilla anything. I prefer my videos without subtitles. I have that set as a preference. Yet when chromecasting it is common for the subtitles to spontaneously turn on. And has done so for a long time.

English is not my first language and my first language is not widely used. Hence I am not used to dubbed movies/programming and I am used to seeing subtitles.

If a native english speaker could understand the horror show that the machine generated subtitles are. If you are used to subtitles they are extremely hard to ignore. You will then read and get the understanding (often hilariously wrong) before the audio catches up and you might end up rather confused.

I can understand an American might have a hard time watching a subbed German movie. Thats natural because it is not common. But when you grew up with subtitles it is actually effortless. Except when they are poor. Then it becomes worse because of the cognitive load of 2 languages and the effort to figure out what is correct.

Dear english only speakers: Translation is hard. A poor translation is worse that no translation as it obfuscates the message. AI is not there yet at all. Maybe impressive but often not helpful or plain and simply distorts the real message.

[eCa]

As a fellow non English native speaker, I concur with all of the above. But if you only have time for one sentence:

> A poor translation is worse than no translation

[bmn__]

What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?

This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.

[vintermann]

Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm.

I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me more machine-translated videos.

[bmn__]

There will be no understanding if you do not even make a token effort to suppress your egocentric worldview and engage in honest conversation.

[clan]

Did you?

They base the feed on user input. The feed is then (supposedly) adjusted to what I like.

What I call a signal you call an attack.

I signal that I do not like Minecraft videos. But I do not attack them.

Your anger is misdirected. You should be mad at YouTube because they do not seem to understand that there can be multiple signals at once.

The chances that I click on a Minecraft video is low. Autotranslated even lower.

So we differ strongly in opinion on how the platform should work. I read your "attack" argument as I should write to the Minecraft creators and tell them their content would be better if they played Minesweeper instead.

I do not punish anyone. I just pursue a clean and (for me) high quality feed.

If you are up in arms that I punish your channel that is another signal that I am probably not your target audience.

When dealing with audiences at scale you need to listen to these signals as handling personal opinions in mails from the discerning viewer is not feasible.

[vintermann]

The vast majority of videos are not translated into borked machine-Norwegian, so if this isn't something you opt in to, it's something everyone opts out of (I doubt it).

> A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.

No it isn't, because I see what kinds of channels do this, over and over again. They're very clearly publishers who don't care that they make something objectively worse as long as the algorithm rewards them for it.

> If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.

Ha, as if they ever read that. Probably more Google employees will read this comment than will ever read any of my (many) "please stop translating things without asking, I know where to find machine translation if I need it, doing it without asking that means I have to translate back from broken Norwegian into English in order to understand what the hell you were trying to say" feedback reports.

[bluGill]

The channel I'm interested in would be of great interest to English speakers. There are only a few people brave/stupid enough to travel to dangerous places (Ukraine near the front) to do a documentary. I cannot blame the author for turning on the translate, it likely overall expands his reach and is a good thing for those who are not interested in his native language. However I'm trying to learn his native language and getting dropped to English out of my control is not helpful to me.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault.

Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?

[Narishma]

One way to tell is when the video has text in the thumbnail. If it's in a different language than the title it has likely been auto translated.

[gus_massa]

I guess it's the default option. I've seen a few good channels that have that "feature" enabled. I hate it too.