Google must have some awful PMs and designers. The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally. How could you miss that people can be fluent in multiple languages and if I click on a video in a foreign language, I most likely want the original soundtrack? Clearly, the intention was to boost some metric “X users are using this feature” with no regard for the actual user.
> The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally.
Recently anyways. The most egregious thing about Youtube, which is not terribly new, is the Shorts. If your video is short enough, it is auto-converted to a "Short", and the original aspect ratio gets cropped to be vertical orientation (for viewing on a phone, presumably).
It's wild how disrespectful this is to viewers and content creators. Google literally couldn't care less what people want, it's just a machine that optimizes for whatever KPIs a given manager has that quarter, users be damned.
Of course Google doesn't have to care about users because they have a dozen different monopolies. It's sad that they were allowed to get to this point.
I personally feel it would be best to stop watching shorts itself, and I personally feel the best way to block it is using some chrome extension for atleast the desktop... I use
Important content and information I want is on YouTube. I pay a YouTube subscription.
I have ADHD. YouTube shorts are poison. I don’t want them. I keep clicking “not interested”. They go away for a bit, they come back, I waste hours of my life scrolling through them before I notice. I click “not interested” 20 more times to get a few days relief…
Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.
The most irritating thing for me now is that YouTube doesn’t work in my browser anymore. Clearly being a/b tested because sometimes it does, and sometimes it spews out thousands of console errors and doesn’t load anything.
Yes. Presently, with ublock origin on fairly default settings, YouTube causes an unresponsive tab that doesn't play the video, and a blast of errors on the console. Disabling UBO on youtube.com fixed the problem instantly for me (which is fine since I pay for YouTube Premium because it's the correct solution to the problem of "pay content creators and don't destroy my experience")
I watch about 50% Japanese content and having to switch this off manually has become a major source of annoyance. Bizarrely, if I misunderstand something in Japanese and want to go back to check, these same videos normally don't have any English subtitles available. There's auto-transcribed Japanese subtitles which are about 90% accurate, but they're rarely translated.
The absolutely wild disparity in compute required to translate the Japanese text to English vs rendering an entirely new soundtrack in English blows my mind. I guess someone at Google thought it made sense because many people prefer dubs to subs, but that's on highly polished entertainment product vs 1-person-and-their-Japanese-vlog channels which are not aiming at a mass audience.
if it increases topline metrics like watch time it's probably hard for them to justify removing it. a change this big seems like it was probably a/b tested and did move metrics significantly?
Probably. We keep watching all kind of stuff after getting baited into it. AI slob is annoying, but we do want to know what chefs do about sticky pizza dough, or what that secret in the pyramids is, or how the kid reacted to what the cat did, or (insert your guilty pleasure here).
on some platforms I try to be really good about hitting the "Never recommend this channel/page/whatever again" whenever the algo serves me the bottom-tier gutter trash videos, such as the "idiotic life hack that obviously won't work" engagement bait. It's a small drop in the ocean, but at least that one channel will never be served to me again.
Yeah, they do. It's just that the customers have changed. Once they were the viewers, then the advertisers, and now that monopoly power is secure, the "customers" of those PMs are the financial backers.
I complained about the same problem a while ago. There are a few recommendations for alternative YT interfaces that don't seem to be as messed up yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503218
And apropos of nothing... there's another link on the front page at the moment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850430 ) talking about Apple crossing the red line of customer satisfaction. This got me thinking... to Alphabet, you're not the customer, you're the product. YouTube is a sugary trap to lure eyeballs into the advosphere.
YouTube is one of the better ones -- sort of -- in that you can simply pay with a very small amount of money rather than by wasting a ton of time on ads.
Only "sort of" though since they still use the same spammy algorithm-driven timeline and Shorts and stuff, and are clearly still trying to maximize your total watch time. Given that I just pay a fixed fee, I wish they'd use a different algorithm that only seeks to keep my engagement with YouTube from dipping too low, rather than the default which is clearly designed to turn a 23-hour-a-day user into 24.
In addition to the feature being auto-on (for me, at least) and unasked-for, you also need to perform multiple clicks through non-obvious menus (I think one of them was "Audio track"?) to get to the original audio. Another layer of obnoxiousness.
Go to your Google account settings; add the languages you speak and don’t want auto translations for in your personal profile.
I agree that the auto dubbing is the worst feature. It may have been HN where I read the above tip to turn that off, it seems to have worked for me so far.
This is not sufficient for me, I keep getting surprise AI dubs for videos in languages I declared I understand (same for video titles). Fortunately there's a Firefox extension that solved the issue for me but I keep encountering the problem on the Android application.
I always immediately hid "don't recommend channel" on auto-dubbed videos without even opening them. Maybe a flood of negative impressions on all of non-English YouTube will draw some attention. Maybe not. It doesn't matter.
YouTube is also applying "AI enhancement" to videos. Several people have had their videos replaced with a mangled version that flashes bright rapid flickering static through the background. It's a genuine epilepsy danger and the channel owner has no control. If they complain to YouTube the video sometimes is silently replaced with the original (until the bots get to it again). Otherwise they can only repeatedly re-upload the video.
It's insane how desperate all of tech is to quintuple down on the sunk cost of AI
Google have always had problems with people who do not fit - e.g. speaking multiple languages, not speaking the majority language in their country ec.
I remember back when i had a site with Google ads on it (about 15 or 20 years ago) I could not change some selection to do with what ads were shown on my .co.uk site to UK because I was not in the UK at the time.
There were other issues with default language assumptions, which were worse as they changed over time. They really should respect browser settings.
Its not just Google. A lot of websites use national flags for languages, which has practical problems in countries that speak many languages, and frequently has political overtones.
It's been like this for decades. Remember Google+? Remember Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts/Meet/Allo/Duo etc? The company simply values internal political advantage over coherent product development or user experience.
At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.
This happened to me for the first (and only time so far) the other day on a video that wasn’t even in another language but from an guy who sometimes posts in another language (but usually in English) but does have a strong German (I think) accent. I was so confused at first and it took me a while to figure out what was going on as I could tell his voice was weird and then noticed the audio was completely out of sync.
Reddit has machine-translated their whole site in different languages and made these translated versions google-indexed. That polluted google result severely. As if google weren't bad enough today.
What? I had no idea this was a feature! I guess I don't watch that much content in other languages. I'd assume even if someone wasn't multi-lingual, I'd prefer subs written or translated by the creator, not some AI bot.
