[cubefox]

That reminds me of another YouTube embarrassment: Some ten years ago, Facebook added a "translate" button to every comment. The translations were pretty bad (they used Bing Translate rather than the much better Google Translate), but it was really useful to understand people from all over the world.

You would think YouTube (owned by Google) would in short order also add such a button to comments. Haha, no. They didn't.

About a decade later, probably more, they finally implemented it, albeit only in desktop mode. Not a big deal, just millions and millions of unreadable comments for millions of users for many years. Was probably prioritized at #837,434,211.

[realusername]

Even right now the translate button on YouTube is still broken, it doesn't depend of the languages of your account but on an inaccessible list somewhere.

You can have your translate button language different than your account language. (Which is the case for my account)

[cubefox]

I think it has to do with the fact that YouTube basically never had serious competitors except in the very early days. The only semi-competition is now TikTok, which they copied with YouTube Shorts. But their regular video business has been completely unchallenged for 15 years. In an environment without competition, efficiency and effectiveness of internal decision making can easily degrade over time.

[xp84]

Yep and that also explains why YouTube's comments section is the biggest dumpster fire of outright scams I've ever seen: why would they care?