Technology @lemmy.world misk @sopuli.xyz 2w ago

YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos

techcrunch.com YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos | TechCrunch

YouTube is testing a new experimental feature that will allow viewers to add "Notes" to provide more context and information on videos.

86 comments

Re-Enabling the dislike button would help too
- Nah. Low value signal. Easy to game.
- It was removed because Biden got too many downvotes. It'll be back soon. It was stupid of them to take it away.
  
  That's not why it was removed
  
  It was removed not long after one of their Rewind vids was disliked to hell.
  
  And it ain't coming back, at least they haven't so much as hinted at it
  
  Lol no.
So now we have to read a community note to know a video is garbage instead of just seeing a massive dislike bar and clicking off?
- Didn't they take away the dislike button?
  
  The removed the dislike count a couple years ago, so you can no longer see if a video is terrible.
I feel like this is what the comment section is used for.
- Can the channel owner delete comments on their videos?
  
  Yes, as well as automatically hiding new comments.
  
  And Youtube will 100% allow creators to hide notes, as well. Corporations will not allow themselves to be criticized on their own pages.
- I value my mental health too much to regularly dive into the YouTube comment section
another chance to provide free labour to train their AI!
- I'm sure the annotations will be intelligent and insightful...
  
  Yeah clearly training data does get much review for these peasant facing products. I am assuming real tool will take legions of pros to properly tune up.
  
  The issue not LLM per we, the issue is that none of these clown companies appear to do Amy data quality control. They just rush whatever janky thing they got to drive headlines.
Didn't they take away crowd-sourced subtitles before?
- Damn I miss those. Nowadays it's really hard to find a video that's in another language and has subtitles. The only subtitles you will find are the automatically-generated ones, which suck
  
  They're at least understandable (usually), but they're like 5-10 seconds behind the video (sometimes longer), and they can be difficult to interpret at times.
This sounds like a great spot for scammers to flood for maximum visabilty. It'll be too much effort to moderate, so creators will just disable them (if they can) or this will be shut down in about (checks YouTube's history of dealling with scammers) 3.5 years.
That’s not going to go wrong at all.
I mean, if this is basically Twitter's Community Notes feature, but for YouTube, I'm all for it. Bit of a balancing act, but it's the last thing that hasn't been completely wrecked now that Twitter became Xitter.
I give this about two weeks before they realize that it's as effective at helping their advertising as having dislike buttons are.

I am not condoning poisoning of this well of information, but I will laugh my ass off when it inevitably occurs.
- I condone poisoning this feature with false info. maybe it will teach them that the dislikes should be public again. using an extension is cool and all, but so many people still don't know about it.
- It really is unfortunate as it COULD be a really good feature if it were being implemented by someone who wasn't just trying to crowdsource AI training data that will go into commercial products without compensation to anyone. It could be a great tool for professionals and experts to expand on what creators say, a way to call out falsehoods and Hypocrites, and a way to find your people in a world that is growing ever bleaker. But no, it is just being done to force more ads down our throats and harvest more money from us.
- And, once they discontinue it, I hope someone creates an add-on to bring it back like they did with dislikes.
  
  It's a bit out-of-scope, but it'd be a great SponsorBlock feature!
So we can explicitly graffiti videos but we can't add translations. 🤯
- Advertisers working in your native language cannot hijack your attention when foreign language videos are running. Subtitling facilitates that, and encourages site activity that differs from consumption, such as broadening one's horizons and being inquisitive about the real world.
This is just for training AI.
Wait, didn't this feature already exist for years and then was shut down??
lol, considering the “quality” content in the comments section it’s just going to be a continuation of that dumpster fire.
- I would never go as far as to say that they're "quality," but I do think YT comment sections aren't the complete shitshow that they were a decade or so ago. It really does depend on the channel though too.
Time to scrape notes data for ai
I miss when Youtube had community sourced subtitles and those little annotations on the video...
Yeah that'll end well I'm sure.
It's our duty to describe all videos as pizza glue recipes.
So more virtue signal crap. Got it.
- Users provided additional context to this reply:
  
  This guy is a dumbass lmao
  
  You sound stupid when you don't have independent thought. Maybe not here in this circle jerk but in the real world.
- Amazing how often user's notes disagree with your worldview isn't it?
  
  I wonder where the problem stems from. Could they all be wrong?
  
  It's amazing how your worldview lines up with what the media told you to say. Not a single independent thought.
Hopefully it's on by default and works like the old pop-up-video messages over the video. It should play a sound every time one pops up and then a bubble popping sound when you click on it to close it.
Thanks bruh, if I had the patience to deal with ads maybe I’d watch YouTube.

86 comments