Hello Insiders! This week I have a special guest I've got James who's
working on some very important captions planning. Welcome to the show James.
Hey Tom thanks for having me.
It''s good to have you back brother.
Now today we're gonna talk about Community Captions and what we're gonna
kind of be a little more transparent than we usually are around some of these
types of projects because we're we're taking a hard look on whether we should
sort of continue supporting them or not. That's that's a pretty big decision so
maybe can you give folks a little bit of background on what is this feature
why did we do it and you know why are we why are we thinking about it now.
Yeah absolutely so first kind of you said before this is something this is
a new experiment that we're trying here we do here pretty often from Creators
that big decisions get made without necessarily Creators feeling like they
have a chance to give input so we are using this opportunity to take a step
back and ask Creators what they think about a decision before it gets made.
And so we are starting to think about whether or not we continue to have the
Community Captions feature or whether or not it makes sense to shut it down.
Before I go into more detail about that let me just kind of clarify
a little bit what that means. So there are three ways that
most creators get captions or subtitles. The first that many of
you are probably familiar with is our automatic captions and those,
for a number of languages, just happen automatically on your
video. Second many of you upload them yourselves in some way, shape or form.
And then the the last way is there's a Community Captions feature where
you can opt-in and allow anyone on the Internet to come and suggest captions
for your video. And it's really the third one that we're wondering
if it makes sense to continue or if the effort that would be spent
kind of building and maintaining it would be spent on other features.
Right and in fairness it's probably we're leaning in the direction of
of deprecating it and so this is a very important conversation because
we also know a lot of Creators feel passionately about captions.
This idea of anyone in the world can help you caption your video
and then translate it and make it kind of more accessible is an
amazing vision. Like what what do you think is driving our
contemplation of why we wouldn't continue support in that future?
I couldn't agree more with it without you framed it the
reason that we're considering it ultimately comes down to not that
many Creators are ultimately using it. Just to be totally transparent it's less
than one one thousandth of a percent of channels have approved a community
caption track in the last month . And so we actually went and started
to talk with channels about why they aren't using it, particularly ones that
had used it in the past or were large enough to have an audience for it. Some
of the things that we heard were, "Well, I really love that it exists," right
everyone is positive on the theory and then they said, "But..." They say things
like, "But I've had problems with spam," or, "It's not reliable enough for me."
If we want to have the most accessible product possible for as many different
people, we want creators to have the widest possible audience for their
videos this Community Captions feature isn't accomplishing that goal. Even
though it sounds really great in theory, it only works for the biggest channels.
And then there's problems with spam and abuse and then people turn it off. And
then consequently it's not on that much watch time so only about 0.2%
of watch time has a community caption track on it. And so that's what has
this leaning towards actually shutting this this feature down.
I guess some people may wonder like, "Hey,
well just leave it alone just leave it as is." Like, why don't you just,
you don't have to spend any more time on it, like just let it be.
Unfortunately that's that's not the reality I think it is
there's some pretty significant costs to keeping it and I think
we have a responsibility to make sure that we're investing in the
places that will have the most kind return-on-investment here.
I totally get where you're coming from and I hope others who are
listening understand to like part of the reason for this video is to say,
hey look if there's an angle we haven't thought about,
you know of course we're gonna keep an open mind,
but we we ultimately want to do the best thing for the Creator ecosystem
overall. But where are we going with with the future of our captions roadmap?
Yeah I'm glad you asked. So we absolutely are not getting rid of the
ability for a Creator to upload captions or translations to their channel like
that's not even in the consideration set. There's a bunch of work that's
continuing to happen on automatic captions, making them more accurate,
supporting more languages, making them better, support punctuation and grammar,
capitalization and stuff like that. We're coming at this from
wanting to have the most accessible platform possible. It's really about
how do we get there in a way that's safe for the platform,
safe for creators, and you know these are, these are the hard questions.
Yeah that's a great point about the trade-offs because if you're
hearing this and you're like well I vote for keeping it what you're also
voting for is less improvements to the experience for Creators
to upload their own captions, less improvements on the automated captions,
less improvements on the ability to refine the automated captions.
Setting aside this Community Caption stuff when you think about where you'd
like to see captions go forward what what are some of the things
that you're kind of excited for us as a team to consider?
We are working on a new captions editor that I am really excited for.
We actually have some creators out there using an alpha version for
the first time right now. I'm really excited to see a tighter integration
between what the Creator does and auto captions and maybe the Creator,
auto captions, and Google translate. There's opportunities maybe to extend
some of our Permission tools. Some of the Creators I spoke to said,
"Well actually I don't use the project the product the way you intend. I have
my three people that caption all my videos and I only approve things that
they write and I would much rather just be able to send
them an invite from permissions you know to be able to kind of access
only the captions and that would be a better workflow for me and my team."
With that said are there any other questions that you have,
James that you want to hear from the audience that they
can give us feedback on in terms of how we're thinking about this?
Yeah, we would love it if people would weigh in here. The best type of feedback
you can give us is information about why and how it would affect your channel.
If you don't think that we should do this. One more thing, if I could I
do want to just say we realize this is a tough conversation and we
thank you guys for having it with us you know.
James it just occurred to me that the other thing that we should mention is that this is a
bit of a new format of an Insider video. Like usually it's hey here's
some cool new stuff coming. This one is a little bit further upstream in
the product development process and so if you guys watching this have feedback
on you know if you want to see this much of the sausage-making like you know we
could try and do more of it. I think the risk is always like well you're
never going to make everyone happy and then people are gonna be pissed
if you go in a different direction I think we're taking a bet here that
being more transparent and putting all the cards on the table might help us
make a better decision based on the input.
Yeah this is brand-new first. time we've done something like this at least as far as I know.
So make sure you subscribe to creator inside or if you want to go behind the curtain
and you can really get involved in our product development. It's
definitely inside baseball stuff, but hopefully some people find it helpful.
All right you guys keep it real we'll see you next time. Thanks James!