YouTube Community Contributions

» see youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Anyone watching a video could write its subtitles. You opened a panel under somebody else's upload and typed the lines against the timecode. The uploader reviewed and published them, or enough other viewers reviewed the same submission that it published itself. It cost nothing and required no relationship with the channel.

YouTube turned this on in November 2015, along with crowdsourced translations of titles and descriptions. The pitch to creators was reach: partners in the early tests picked up audiences in languages they did not speak and had never paid to caption. The pitch to viewers was never made out loud because it did not need to be, which is that a video with subtitles is a video you can actually watch.

This is the rare feature where the distance runs the other way. Turkish subtitles on foreign video have always been fan work here, made by people who wanted the thing watchable and who signed the last line. Community Contributions was that habit given an official panel inside the platform. What YouTube switched off in 2020 was not an experiment, it was the formal version of something the non-English internet had been doing unpaid since long before YouTube existed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ zero point zero zero one percent of channels ~

The announcement came on 31 July 2020, on the Creator Insider channel rather than the main blog. The reasons given were spam and low-quality submissions. There was also a usage figure: fewer than 0.001 percent of channels had ever published community captions. The spam problem was real. People had been writing insults into caption tracks and pushing them past creators who never checked.

The number is the part that does not hold. It counts channels, and a channel is the person uploading. The people this feature existed for were on the other side of the screen, watching, and there is no metric in that sentence for them. One caption track on a video with forty million views serves more human beings than caption tracks across ten thousand channels with two hundred views each, and by the measure YouTube published, the second case scores ten thousand times better.

A Change.org petition started by Emma Wolfe passed forty thousand signatures within days and half a million by the shutdown date. Deaf creators, Rikki Poynter loudest among them, spent two months on the hashtag. YouTube switched the feature off on 28 September 2020, one day after the end of the International Week of the Deaf.

~ eighteen months to a replacement ~

What YouTube offered instead was a six-month Amara subscription for creators who had used community captions in the previous two months, plus improvements to the automatic caption system. Automatic captions are a different product. They transcribe the language being spoken and do not translate it, which means the entire multilingual half of what the feature did had no replacement at all.

A volunteer project called ytcc-archive spent the last weeks before the deadline scraping unpublished caption tracks out of the review queues, because anything still waiting on a creator's approval on 28 September was going to be deleted rather than handed back. The actual replacement, a channel permission role called Subtitle Editor that lets a creator invite specific people, arrived in April 2022. It works. It also requires the creator to know you exist, which is the one thing the old system never asked for.

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