a little over a month ago I got this email from youtube saying that they’re getting
rid of community contributions, which is a really bad decision that I don’t like at
all.
so, if you don’t know, community contributions are this feature on youtube that make it so
you can create subtitles for videos that you didn’t upload yourself.
I have community contributions on my videos so that people can translate them into different
languages.
it’s a really great thing for accessibility, because it means that if you as a youtuber
make videos that reach an international audience, people in your audience can decide that they
want to make your video available in their language, and once the subtitles are there,
you can now reach an even wider audience.
like, okay, real example, recently I’ve been getting a lot of comments in Korean on
my video about regular polyhedra, and that’s because somebody put in the effort to translate
it into Korean, so now it’s able to reach all these people who otherwise wouldn’t
have seen it.
the main thing community contributions are used for is something that doesn’t apply
to me but is also super important, and it’s how a lot of youtubers make a bunch of long
unscripted videos?
like, you know, that’s just a whole bunch of what stuff is on youtube. and people who
make those videos usually like, feasibly cannot manually create subtitles for them, but if
they reach an audience, then members of their audience can decide to voluntarily make subtitles
for those videos, which suddenly allows their content to be accessible to the deaf and hard
of hearing.
so that’s super great, right?
like, what a cool feature! it’s a really great way to allow people to support their
favorite creators, while at the same time making youtube content as a whole more accessible.
so, what youtube wants to do is get rid of this feature.
now, they’re not removing community submitted subtitles that are already published, they’re
just making it so you can’t make new ones.
I’ll just read directly from the official statement here.
quote, “Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the community contributions
feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions.”
so, right, this is actually a significant problem.
a lot of subtitles made with community contributions are not very good, because it’s easier to
make bad subtitles than it is to make good subtitles.
fortunately, youtube has a system in place for this.
whenever you make subtitles for a video, the person who uploaded it has to manually check
the subtitle track to make sure it’s not just spam. it used to be that you could set
it up to approve new subtitles automatically, but that led to a lot of abuse, so you can’t
do that anymore.
problem solved!
obviously, it isn’t perfect.
one of the most obvious problems with the community contributions feature is the complete
lack of notifications for when someone makes a new subtitle track for a video.
the only way to know if someone spent hours or even days of hard work translating one
of your videos into another language or transcribing it in the first place is to just manually
check the “community” tab in the “subtitles” section of the youtube studio.
you can’t see new submissions any other way.
and also, just because a creator has to individually approve each subtitle track doesn’t mean
that there isn’t still abuse.
most youtubers don’t actually thoroughly check if the subtitles submitted are actually
accurate, for any number of reasons.
the fix for this isn’t as obvious as it is for the lack of notifications, but it still
could be solved.
like, what, youtube has a built in automatic subtitle generation thing right, so it could
just flag up parts of the subtitles that are significantly different from the automatic
subtitles so that the person who uploaded the video doesn’t have to check as much
stuff.
or also like, there could be more clear communication directed at people making subtitles reminding
them that subtitles are an accessibility feature and you shouldn’t be adding in extra jokes
or using fancy unicode mathematical letterlike symbols that make the text less readable.
you know, stuff like that would be nice to communicate.
so, okay, why does youtube think that the solution to these problems is to just completely
remove the feature altogether?
quote, “As a result, the feature is rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having
published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month.”
this is the part that makes me angry enough to make a video about this.
this got me upset enough that I ended up doing math about it.
the thing I think you’re supposed to think that this means is “almost nobody uses community
contributions, so not much will be lost if we make it so you can’t make new ones!”
this on its own is a wild thing to say.
community contributions are an accessibility feature.
of course not that many people use them.
that’s just, what it means for something to be an accessibility feature.
however, if you look a bit closer at this statement, it’s actually much worse.
I mean, 0.2% of watch time?
do you know how much watch time that is?
I mean like, okay, in 2019, youtube as a company made 15 billion dollars through ad revenue,
which is like one and a quarter billion dollars per month.
that means that, if a feature is being used for 0.2% of watch time in one month, it’s
safe to assume that 0.2% of the ads shown to people that month were shown to people
who use this feature, which means that the group of people that youtube is saying is
too small to be worth supporting watched two and a half million dollars worth of advertising
over the course of that month.
but don’t worry, it gets worse! let’s look at that other statistic, 0.001% of channels.
that sounds like, really low, right?
like, that’s the main leg youtube has to stand on here, that only 0.001% of channels
use this feature.
but like, what does that actually mean? as you might know, everyone who has an account
on youtube also has a channel that they can upload videos to. and youtube is specifying
“channels” here, not “creators”, so that “0.001% of channels” is actually
saying that of the actual billions of accounts that exist on the platform, only a very small
portion of them added this accessibility feature to one of their videos that month.
to be clear, the number of channels on youtube is in the billions, but the number of people
who have uploaded videos to youtube is in the tens of millions.
so, somewhere around one percent of all channels on youtube have videos that could possibly
be given community contributions in the first place.
but then, most channels on youtube that have uploaded videos don’t actually have any
subscribers who would watch a video and then submit captions for it! and of the channels
that do have subscribers, a large portion haven’t uploaded any videos recently enough
for anyone to consider creating captions for them.
remember, this website has existed since 2005.
so yeah, of course only 0.001% of channels approved new community captions in July 2020.
I’d love to see how that statistic compares to what percentage of channels, say, pinned
a comment, since that’s another thing that only applies to channels who actually have
videos that people watch.
actually, no, that’s not a good comparison, because youtube tells you when you get a new
comment, and pinning a comment is really easy to do.
hey, youtube, in July 2020, what percentage of channels edited a playlist to set it as
an official series? you know how you do that? first you gotta press the ellipses button
there to open up this menu, then you gotta press the “playlist settings” button to
open up THIS menu, then you gotta press “advanced settings” which takes you to a completely
different part of the website just to show you THIS menu, and NOW you can click the checkbox
that makes it an official series playlist.
so, youtube, how many people did that in July 2020? you know, this feature isn’t being
used that much, and there’s a lot of room for abuse here!
I mean, this gives someone a lot of control over the recommendation algorithm.
better make it so you can’t change which playlists are official series anymore just
to be safe!
okay, right, so what youtube is offering to replace community contributions is, quote
“special pricing with third-party providers, who can assist with your caption, translation,
and subtitle needs.”
I could go into detail over the merits of these third-party providers, but honestly,
the fact that they’re paid services is really all you need to know.
if you as a creator are unable to make subtitles for a video yourself, whether it’s for
a language you don’t speak, or if it’s because your videos are really long, youtube
is saying that after September 28th, you’ll need to either use the lackluster automatically
generated captions or pay up.
big channels that can afford it will be fine.
a lot of them already pay professionals to make subtitles for their videos in the first
place.
but for the rest of us? all this will do is make youtube as a platform less accessible.
this decision is bad for the deaf, the hard of hearing, and for those with audio processing
disorders, and on top of that, it’s also bad for anyone who doesn’t speak English,
whether they’re watching videos or creating them.
this decision is youtube as a company openly saying that they do not care about accessibility.
it’s not the worst decision youtube has ever made, but it certainly comes close.
so, please, if this bothers you as much as it bothers me, please make it clear to youtube
that removing community contributions is a horrible idea.
they’re obviously not going to do anything about it, but at the very least if we get
enough people talking about it youtube might make a second official statement about it.
like, hey, real talk, while I’m sure many of you have already seen other youtubers talking
about this, nobody I’m subscribed to has made a video about this yet, which says to
me that not enough people are angry.
I know it’s unreasonable to assume that any amount of complaining will convince youtube
to reverse this, and also there’s several more important things to be angry about right
now.
I get it.
but still, if any of our current problems could possibly be solved entirely by loudly
complaining, this is it.
don’t do it for me, do it for the vtubers. and also the millions of people who rely on
community captions to be able to enjoy youtube videos.
I’m not just going to repeat the thing I said last time I didn’t have a sign off,
because if I do that then it would become a sign off which would ruin the point.