As I've been talking a lot about the hangups in captioning on YouTube lately, it's deeply unfortunate that they've decided to drop this (flawed) feature rather than improving it.
The main reason they're discontinuing is "low use". The issues with the community captions system which contribute to that low use are that it's vulnerable to abuse and it's largely invisible to channel owners.
The alerts system has been broken for ages, now. Either you get a notification with every single subscription (i.e. potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions) or you get none.
So the channels that benefit most from having a large enough community to crowdsource captions and translations are too big to process notifications, and thus never see if there are new submissions pending unless they go and check.
Approving a submission is often an act of faith because, let's face it, none of us want to sit and read through a 8500 word Google translate re-translation of submitted Czech subtitles just to make sure that things don't get weird 35 minutes into the video.
This means you're just kinda trusting that the submissions are
1) good faith
2) actually complete
3) reasonably accurate
And a lot of creators, understandably, aren't willing to take that risk.
1) good faith
2) actually complete
3) reasonably accurate
And a lot of creators, understandably, aren't willing to take that risk.
Stack all of these together, and when you *do* go and check for submissions, there might be *hundreds* across dozens of videos, and every single one requires a multi-step manual review to process.
If you want to know what that feels like, imagine at your job suddenly discovering you have a second email that you haven't checked in eight years.
Oddly the "community" captioning is/was devoid of community. I can't see who contributed what, which inhibits forming the kind of trust relationships where you can see so-and-so submitted something, it's gonna be fine, no need to comb through it.
Now, YouTube did make a halfhearted attempt at improving trust a few years ago with the YouTube Heroes program, but they did such a poor job at that announcement that people lost their minds and the program was quietly abandoned.
The new dashboard’s interface for managing community captions is strictly an improvement over the old, but that is damning with the faintest praise. Better, but still not good.
My guess is on the accessibility front they consider auto-captions (and creator-corrected auto-captions) "good enough"
Part of the complication with the conversation is that the system intersects a bunch of different uses, and those uses have different specific hangups, but also different solutions.
I'm equipped to caption my videos in English, and am actively working on better workflows to speed the process up and make it more consistent across my channel and available from minute one of publication.
I'll never be able to translate my videos into Czech.
I'll never be able to translate my videos into Czech.
