Thread by @Defunctland

YouTube ending their community captions feature is ridiculous. Excuse the bluntness, but the answers to the problems that they cited are so obvious that everyone involved should be embarrassed verging on ashamed of themselves.

"Rarely used"

YouTube still redirects me to Creator Studio Classic when I want to update my captions. You overhaul EVERYTHING about YouTube Studio over the period of a year and do NOTHING to captioning.

And then you have the audacity to cite "rarely used" as a reason to why no one uses a feature that your company neglected in the first place.

"Spam and abuse"

Any community feature can be abused. I'm not a programmer but here's an idea. Use the data collected from your auto-captioning to determine how close the community CC's are, and if it is outside a certain threshold flag it for review and inform me the creator.

Or implement true community features. Maybe these are already done behind the scenes, but wouldn't it be nice if users who have provided multiple correct transcripts for creators were given priority and trust that I as a creator could see?

"[User] has provided [number] of verified transcripts."

Boom. Approve.

"[User] has been flagged for providing incorrect transcripts"

Great, let me take a look at what they wrote.

Did you know you could report a captions issue? I just found it! It is very last on the multiple reasons you can report a video. Right under "promotes terrorism" and "child abuse" is "captions issue." And there are only three options for reporting. Did anyone even try with this?

We all know the real reason here has to be money. But how can someone honestly sleep at night, @SusanWojcicki or any of @TeamYouTube, when you decide to make a quick buck at the expense of people who are hard of hearing or foreign language speakers?

I've relied on community captions for a lot of my videos, and I personally have not done enough to ensure captions are provided for all of my videos. I've gotten better in the past year, but community captions have helped when I forget or don't have the time to do it myself.

So I WILL pay for the inevitable service that they are going to offer, but as other creators have stated, we'll probably only be able to afford English, which absolutely sucks, since I've had community captions in foreign languages, something I cannot afford/do myself.

And it just feels like they know this. Like they know that many creators will pay so more people can enjoy our content, not just from the greed of views but from actually wanting to be inclusionary. And to force our hand like this is just so... slimy? Is that fair?

Anyways, that's all I've got. It's just frustrating. When they tried to change the verified system, everyone rallied just like we are now, but in that situation, they could sense it would touch their pockets. Now it's just touching their hearts, and it's not working. It's sad.