Categories: YouTube

YouTube To Shutter Community Captions Feature, Citing Issues With Spam, Abuse, Little Usage

Beginning Sept. 28, YouTube will no longer allow viewers to add subtitles to creators’ videos.

“Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the Community Contributions feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions,” Team YouTube wrote in a notice about the shutdown. It added that the feature–which also lets users offer translated titles and video descriptions–is “rarely used,” citing internal data showing that fewer than 0.001% of channels have published community-contributed captions in the past month.

Community Contributions is one of three ways YouTube videos can be captioned in their original languages and translated into others. The other ways include creators writing subtitles for their own videos themselves, or YouTube’s auto-captioning system — which is not exactly known for its stellar performance. Team YouTube said these both of these methods are more popular than Community Contributions.

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

But, as The Verge pointed out, some Deaf and hard of hearing YouTubers are protesting the platform’s decision. Rikki Poynter, a Deaf beauty vlogger-turned-activist who founded the #NoMoreCRAPtions initiative for wider access to better subtitles across the web at large, tweeted her disapproval, and said that she had met with YouTube to discuss the feature — apparently to no avail.

“Unfortunately, if they didn’t listen to me when we had our meeting, and didn’t listen to everyone telling them off in the comments months ago, I don’t

think they’ll listen now,” she wrote.

And hearing YouTubers, including Hank Green, have noted that YouTube isn’t immediately offering a replacement feature:

That said, YouTube does seem to be attempting to mitigate things for creators who rely on community-provided captions. It has partnered with subtitling service Amara.org, providing a free six-month subscription to any creator who has published Community Contributions on at least three of their videos within the last 60 days. Eligible creators will see a notification pop up in the News Card section of their YouTube Studio “in the coming weeks,” YouTube said. It’s also offering special pricing (though details have not yet been specified) for three more subtitling services: 3Play Media, Cielo24, and Rev.

Community Contributions that have already been published will not go away, and will still be accessible for editing, YouTube added. Any contributions that are currently pending approval/saved as drafts will be available in creators’ content managers until Sept. 28; they’ll disappear that day.

There is a possibility YouTube intends to release more captioning functions in the future. The company said that it’s “committed to improving accessibility and caption features, as well as introducing new and better tools for creators to reach the broadest possible audience.”

Tubefilter has reached out to YouTube for more details about additional captioning tools. We’ll update this story with any new information.

Share
Published by
James Hale
Tags: YouTube

Recent Posts

Creators on the Rise: Gabi Chappel is going next level

Welcome to Creators on the Rise, where we find and profile breakout creators who are…

15 hours ago

Epic Games paid $320 million to creators over 12 months. These ‘Fortnite’ developers were top earners.

Epic Games' payouts to creators haven't been quite as plentiful as Roblox's, but the Fortnite publisher is…

17 hours ago

Creators Guild of America offers proper accreditation with “the IMDb for everyone”

The Creators Guild of America is making good on its promise to provide support for digital professionals.…

18 hours ago

The 2024 NAB Show introduces 30-session track for digital content creators

The National Association of Broadcasters' longtime trade event NAB Show has welcomed content creators for…

18 hours ago

LinkedIn is testing its version of the For You Page

LinkedIn is the latest platform to experiment with a TikTok-style feed. The professional social network acknowledged that…

20 hours ago

More than 25% of channels in the YouTube Partner Program have monetized their Shorts

YouTube has been offering ads on Shorts for one year, and the results have been encouraging thus far.…

22 hours ago