- Check out the flames over my shoulder here.
YouTube is getting rid of a feature
and I think it's a bad idea
and actually, I'm kind of upset about it
if you can't tell from my expression.
YouTube makes changes all the time
and I always react negatively to them
but a lot of them end up in the end being fine.
This one I think is just wrong from top to bottom.
What they're doing is getting rid
of community contributions.
Now, what that is is the ability for viewers like you
to submit captions in any language for a video
and if you look on pretty much most of my videos
especially the big comedy videos,
they will have community contributions.
They'll be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic,
so on and so forth.
A ton of great people, viewers watching,
translating, submitting and I really appreciate it
and starting on September 28th,
they're not gonna be able to submit any new captions.
The ones that are there will still be there
but what this means is that after September 28th,
only English speakers will be able to have captions
on my video.
So if you don't understand English, you're screwed, sorry,
and it makes me sad because I see comments a lot
that'll be like, please translate this video in the Arabic,
where are the Portuguese subtitles?
The Brazilians, man, they came out of nowhere.
I look at my analytics
to see where in the world my viewers are watching
and it's usually a plurality of Americans
and after that, it was usually the UK or Canada
but Brazil came out of nowhere.
It's like 5% of the viewers now.
Good job, Brazil.
I see you guys.
So I'm getting all these Portuguese translations.
Not anymore, not after the 28th.
Sorry, guys.
YouTube has a message for you, eff you basically
but you know what's even worse?
On my channel, I'll be fine when it comes to English stuff
because I always purchase my captions anyway
because I want the English ones ready to go
as soon as the video is released
but there are a lot of creators who rely on their viewers
to submit even the English ones
because they don't either have the time
or the money or whatever to do it.
There are non-English speaking YouTubers
who rely on their English speaking fans
to translate and submit community contributions
so that it can be enjoyed by English speakers.
Those people are screwed too.
YouTube has another big eff you to you
and basically to the deaf and hearing impaired community.
YouTube also has a big eff you for you as well.
In some ways, it's an accessibility feature
so that people can enjoy the video
even if they can't hear and YouTube,
YouTube's reasoning for getting rid of this
is because not enough people use it.
So it's almost like saying,
only like two people use this wheelchair ramp
in front of this building.
We're just gonna get rid of it.
I don't want it there anymore.
They're not like getting rid of captions.
So you could say I'm overreacting
and oh, they have automated,
automatically generated captions but we know those suck.
There's no punctuation.
It's like a garbled mess but YouTube's like,
oh, you can still have captions.
Just go to these services and pay money for it
which is fine if you're a professional YouTuber
who has the time and the money to do it but maybe you don't.
Maybe you don't wanna do that.
A lot of content comes out from small YouTubers
who don't do this for a living
who don't make money off of it,
who don't have much of a following.
Why would they get captions?
They're just trying to put out videos for a laugh.
Maybe you have people in your audience
who enjoy captioning the videos
and they just wanna provide it.
YouTube is also like, oh, too many people were spamming
the community contributions which might be true
but I can only speak from my experience
that I've only had one spam community contribution
in the year and a half I've had 'em turned on.
All I did was delete it.
It wasn't like a big deal.
To give you some perspective on my channel,
22% of viewers watch with English captions on.
So I'm just gonna imagine
that that's generally what it's like on YouTube at large,
22% of people watch with English captions
and then 4.5% watch with foreign subtitles on
which might not sound like a lot
but that's like 250,000 views a month.
That's a significant amount of people
but that's all gonna go away.
It's gonna soon be zero people
watching with foreign subtitles.
The other side of it is people don't know about it.
I had to research myself
to figure out what community contributions were.
You have to turn it on because it's not automatically on
and then you have to educate your audience about it
because they don't know how.
I get people asking me, how do I submit captions?
I have to tell them.
And then the system is so dumb.
You don't get a notification when a caption is submitted.
You just have to manually check it and approve it.
It's extremely inefficient.
No wonder a lot of people don't use it
and I think a lot more people would have used it
if it had just been made better
but I think YouTube's stance is generally,
if it's not working, let's just get rid of it
instead of making it better
and I suppose on the one hand, how can we blame them?
They have so much video being submitted
every minute of the day.
Maybe they just can't keep up with the technical demands
but it, to me, it just, I don't know,
it just seems like the wrong solution.
Here's the real solution for it.
Already on my channel, I can appoint moderators
who can flag comments.
I think I could even approve like a channel manager
who could edit the video data and stuff and publish videos.
I could be wrong on that.
So why can't I approve people to be caption submitters.
So instead of leaving it wide open to everybody so that,
to get rid of the spam thing,
just make it so that I can appoint the handful of people
that are already submitting captions
to be caption submitters and if new people want to apply,
I get an email that says,
hey, so and so wants to submit captions.
It just makes me mad
because it was such a vibrant thing on my channel.
I get new translations submitted every day
from all different languages.
I know it's the same people every time
and I really appreciate the work that you all put into it
and it just seems like a big slap in the face from YouTube
to be like, nope, that's going away.
Potentially, that's like 250,000 views
that I won't get every month.
If I could bring this back to me for a second,
for the most part, I care mostly about this
because it's just a bunch of viewers
that are gonna be left out in the cold
and especially generally across YouTube,
it's gonna disproportionately affect deaf viewers
and that's messed up but it will also,
I just realized, it'll affect me too.
Those views might just go away
because they can only watch in English.
Yeah, so YouTube, you usually do pretty good
but this is a bad decision
and I would like it if you made a good decision.
Is that a good criticism sandwich there?
Yeah, YouTube, you're given a big middle finger
to a lot of people and I don't think you realize it
but yeah.
#rantover.
Thanks for watching.
Tune in next time for a more normal video that's fun.