(no subject)
I was on Youtube today when i ran into these OBNOXIOUS mid-video textboxes. Apparently they are a "feature," one you can't turn off.
Naturally, I went to "provide feedback" on this matter-- only to discover their feedback group was bugging out and bouncing attempts to join. By the time I worked around THAT, I had a considerable head of steam going. The resulting bug report (reposted below) was somewhat... manic.
(I'm told I'm a lot of fun to watch like this- especially if you're not the one on the receiving end.)
Sannse@ will probably think it's funny, she's seen me do my "supplying both sides of the conversation" thing before. So... YouTube bug report;
Re: Feedback about Video Annotations
The buttons? ( which I'll call [/\] and [7],) pretty much suck. If [/\] has only one option-- why am I required to click down a level to [7] so I can turn annotations on or off? Because it's eventually where more menu commands will live? Okay- but how about giving me an icon's that's a quotebox, or [abc] instead of [7]?
You are testing a beta feature that has potential to is extremely annoying. (Seriously, every example I've run into of it tonight had had the content of "SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE ", over the first 10 seconds of the video, usually accompanied by another permanently affixed invitation to "CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE ----- >" pointed at the "secret link" for the entire duration.)
I didn't know what the hell was going on. Was this malware? BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE MALWARE! And of course the abstract menu controls that didn't seem to DO anything when i clicked them were no help. (Tooltips maybe? If I'm lingering over these things too long, puzzled, how about a text notice below the movie? "I see you've discovered our awesome new annotations feature, wannna know how to use it, or just shut the damn thing off?")
But hey- when I googled "youtube Annoying Text," I finally found a blog test telling me how to turn the devil-boxes off-- every time I play a video.
Listen. To. The. Words. That. Are. Coming. Out. Of. My. Mouth: I want a permanent flag to hide this "feature" that I can click ONCE, not one that I have to repeat for every video I view. I will try this feature again when it is no longer in beta, people have a handle on how to use it in a non-obnoxious manner, and it does not suck. But right NOW? I WANT TO NOT SEE IT.
Also? It took me 15 minutes to sign up for this forum. The 'join this group' links I got when clicking "reply" appear to be broken somehow- insisting that I'm not logged in-- and then sending me to a login screen that clearly shows I AM logged in. The workaround turned out to be clicking 'join' "up" a level, which viewing the main Community Help Forum page instead of the join link that appears when I try to reply on THIS page. (I'm running Firefox 2, though I doubt that's relevant.) If the feedback traffic you're getting seems light, this might be related...
When I check back at this in the morning, will there be a reply telling me how to completely deactivate this feature? Because there's surely no such instructions on Help right now.
Hh. *presses bridge of nose*
I am being, shall-we-say... "emphatic" to the point that might be called rude... but really, between how obnoxious I find this feature, the minimal feedback you have received on it, I'm operating under the impression that the same join-this-group problems I experienced are cutting into the feedback you're receiving- otherwise (given that this feature has been up for a week,) you would have received enough SIMILAR requests that I wouldn't have to waste my time on emphatic feedback, I could simply piggyback on the "hide forever," or "hide for 30 days" feature you doubtless would have implemented in response to the similarly-sentiment'd feedback that you're mysteriously not already receiving. (On this forum that has signup problems.)
*sigh* Or maybe not. Perhaps the spamjockeys just figured out how to become really obnoxious with this feature in the last 24 hours- sometimes there is an uptake lag like that.
...
Having BEEN as emphatic as I can be without slipping into outright "rude," it probably behooves me to gives some actual useful feedback (beyond, you know, the forum bug report.)
1) The menu controls have to allow us to effect permanents change. Hiding yeah- but also eventually to our account Preferred Language settings (buried no more than 2 levels down in the [/\]) menu, INDEPENDENT of the browser settings. Hug the World shows the potential for internationalization of short videos WITHOUT burned-in text (better from a technical standpoint- but more importantly removing the need for a video editor,) and you should be able to have multiple languages in a single file- so people don't have to upload the same video 10 times with different-language annotations. Even if that's not coming until the future, start working out the functionality now.
2) I assume Google translate integration is planned- even if only for the distant future-- and that really excites me. All anyone has to do is transcribe simply-phrased subtitles for a video-- even if they /expect/ most of their audience to be English-speakers... it means that NON-english-speakers will be able to follow them. My god- only 25% of the world speaks English! This quadruples the potential audience and-- the IMPLICATIONS! Auto-translation of text is NOTORIOUSLY jumbled, often difficult to get more than the gist of words. But pidgin-translation, plus visual aids? Plus TONE? Plus BODY LANGUAGE? VIDEO *PLUS* SUBTITLES? (Especially for vlogs!) I can make my video intelligible to someone who speaks Spanish JUST BY TRANSCRIBING IT IN ENGLISH! (In simple sentences, but... you know!) This-- I will be able to internationalize (in a crap but eminently serviceable way) my video WITHOUT having to speak a different language! This SHATTERESS borders- lowering the barrier to participation in intranational dialog- opens up a world where... where the whole WORLD will be able to talk WITH one another instead of AT one another! This QUITE LITERALLY changes everything. Not everything on youtube, or everything in web-video, or everything on the internet-- I mean *literally* EV-ERY-THING. You're going to flatten the Earth, and that AWES me.
Uh, of course, that's probably, um... 18-24 months out, minimum. First you've got to get the annotation system working as smoothly as picture tagging (basic functionality,) and the UI smoothed out. Then multiple selectable language streams (and probably data layers- joy,) maybe an 8 month "window" as people begin to slowly grock that they can watch Al Jazeera reports (prepared by an old-fashioned translator who speaks both languages) until you drop in autotranslation and the whole *world* will open up!
God... *runs fingers through hair,* I've been too hard on Google. You're *not* transitioning to Web 2.0- you're quantum-leapfrogging to Web3! A total endaround all the problems of voice-recognition-and-live-autotranslation we expected would be "next"... all because you won't have to be live! That's-- you beat them to the future! (Well, you /will/ have.)
So... is the translation team working on, like, an English-to-Pidgin tool? So I can transcribe my stuff in English, then easily 'drop it down' into an interlingual interchange format- highlighting all my ambiguities and asking for clarifications so they can be intelligibly parsed into non-Romance languages? That is SO cool.
And I suppose eventually crowdsourced 'proper' translations like Slashdot-- Google Translate does that on a granular level already using statistics.... I'm SO EXCITED! I'm going to be able to piss off people on seven continents at once! (They get internet in Antarctica, right?) It's a whole new world!
Oh, um...
3) If I have the annotations turned off- I think it'd be interesting to see a NUMBER or something telling me HOW MANY annotations there are. If it's just 1 or 2 I can probably assume it's a name and location I'm not interested in. But if it's 17...? Gosh, maybe I'll enable 'em again to see what all this extra info is! Heck- how about letting us mouseover the corner button and SHOW the annotations (just when moused over) without actually turning them on-- like "peeking." (Well, don't use that button, that'd be terrible functionality... bu you get the point.) Tics in the progress bar to show me where the added non-video data appears in the timeline so I know when to peek? (I feel like the clickable frames around the smaller videos in 'Hug The World' shouldn't count toward that somehow...)
Did I mention the current menu icons were extremely anti-intuitive? *looks* Yes I did. Hrm. Well... that's pretty much all the feeedback I have then. Good luck changing the world!
(See, I can be nice when I want to.)
And tell me how to turn the damn thing off until it's ready.
Naturally, I went to "provide feedback" on this matter-- only to discover their feedback group was bugging out and bouncing attempts to join. By the time I worked around THAT, I had a considerable head of steam going. The resulting bug report (reposted below) was somewhat... manic.
(I'm told I'm a lot of fun to watch like this- especially if you're not the one on the receiving end.)
Sannse@ will probably think it's funny, she's seen me do my "supplying both sides of the conversation" thing before. So... YouTube bug report;
Re: Feedback about Video Annotations
The buttons? ( which I'll call [/\] and [7],) pretty much suck. If [/\] has only one option-- why am I required to click down a level to [7] so I can turn annotations on or off? Because it's eventually where more menu commands will live? Okay- but how about giving me an icon's that's a quotebox, or [abc] instead of [7]?
You are testing a beta feature that has potential to is extremely annoying. (Seriously, every example I've run into of it tonight had had the content of "SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE ", over the first 10 seconds of the video, usually accompanied by another permanently affixed invitation to "CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE ----- >" pointed at the "secret link" for the entire duration.)
I didn't know what the hell was going on. Was this malware? BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE MALWARE! And of course the abstract menu controls that didn't seem to DO anything when i clicked them were no help. (Tooltips maybe? If I'm lingering over these things too long, puzzled, how about a text notice below the movie? "I see you've discovered our awesome new annotations feature, wannna know how to use it, or just shut the damn thing off?")
But hey- when I googled "youtube Annoying Text," I finally found a blog test telling me how to turn the devil-boxes off-- every time I play a video.
Listen. To. The. Words. That. Are. Coming. Out. Of. My. Mouth: I want a permanent flag to hide this "feature" that I can click ONCE, not one that I have to repeat for every video I view. I will try this feature again when it is no longer in beta, people have a handle on how to use it in a non-obnoxious manner, and it does not suck. But right NOW? I WANT TO NOT SEE IT.
Also? It took me 15 minutes to sign up for this forum. The 'join this group' links I got when clicking "reply" appear to be broken somehow- insisting that I'm not logged in-- and then sending me to a login screen that clearly shows I AM logged in. The workaround turned out to be clicking 'join' "up" a level, which viewing the main Community Help Forum page instead of the join link that appears when I try to reply on THIS page. (I'm running Firefox 2, though I doubt that's relevant.) If the feedback traffic you're getting seems light, this might be related...
When I check back at this in the morning, will there be a reply telling me how to completely deactivate this feature? Because there's surely no such instructions on Help right now.
Hh. *presses bridge of nose*
I am being, shall-we-say... "emphatic" to the point that might be called rude... but really, between how obnoxious I find this feature, the minimal feedback you have received on it, I'm operating under the impression that the same join-this-group problems I experienced are cutting into the feedback you're receiving- otherwise (given that this feature has been up for a week,) you would have received enough SIMILAR requests that I wouldn't have to waste my time on emphatic feedback, I could simply piggyback on the "hide forever," or "hide for 30 days" feature you doubtless would have implemented in response to the similarly-sentiment'd feedback that you're mysteriously not already receiving. (On this forum that has signup problems.)
*sigh* Or maybe not. Perhaps the spamjockeys just figured out how to become really obnoxious with this feature in the last 24 hours- sometimes there is an uptake lag like that.
...
Having BEEN as emphatic as I can be without slipping into outright "rude," it probably behooves me to gives some actual useful feedback (beyond, you know, the forum bug report.)
1) The menu controls have to allow us to effect permanents change. Hiding yeah- but also eventually to our account Preferred Language settings (buried no more than 2 levels down in the [/\]) menu, INDEPENDENT of the browser settings. Hug the World shows the potential for internationalization of short videos WITHOUT burned-in text (better from a technical standpoint- but more importantly removing the need for a video editor,) and you should be able to have multiple languages in a single file- so people don't have to upload the same video 10 times with different-language annotations. Even if that's not coming until the future, start working out the functionality now.
2) I assume Google translate integration is planned- even if only for the distant future-- and that really excites me. All anyone has to do is transcribe simply-phrased subtitles for a video-- even if they /expect/ most of their audience to be English-speakers... it means that NON-english-speakers will be able to follow them. My god- only 25% of the world speaks English! This quadruples the potential audience and-- the IMPLICATIONS! Auto-translation of text is NOTORIOUSLY jumbled, often difficult to get more than the gist of words. But pidgin-translation, plus visual aids? Plus TONE? Plus BODY LANGUAGE? VIDEO *PLUS* SUBTITLES? (Especially for vlogs!) I can make my video intelligible to someone who speaks Spanish JUST BY TRANSCRIBING IT IN ENGLISH! (In simple sentences, but... you know!) This-- I will be able to internationalize (in a crap but eminently serviceable way) my video WITHOUT having to speak a different language! This SHATTERESS borders- lowering the barrier to participation in intranational dialog- opens up a world where... where the whole WORLD will be able to talk WITH one another instead of AT one another! This QUITE LITERALLY changes everything. Not everything on youtube, or everything in web-video, or everything on the internet-- I mean *literally* EV-ERY-THING. You're going to flatten the Earth, and that AWES me.
Uh, of course, that's probably, um... 18-24 months out, minimum. First you've got to get the annotation system working as smoothly as picture tagging (basic functionality,) and the UI smoothed out. Then multiple selectable language streams (and probably data layers- joy,) maybe an 8 month "window" as people begin to slowly grock that they can watch Al Jazeera reports (prepared by an old-fashioned translator who speaks both languages) until you drop in autotranslation and the whole *world* will open up!
God... *runs fingers through hair,* I've been too hard on Google. You're *not* transitioning to Web 2.0- you're quantum-leapfrogging to Web3! A total endaround all the problems of voice-recognition-and-live-autotranslation we expected would be "next"... all because you won't have to be live! That's-- you beat them to the future! (Well, you /will/ have.)
So... is the translation team working on, like, an English-to-Pidgin tool? So I can transcribe my stuff in English, then easily 'drop it down' into an interlingual interchange format- highlighting all my ambiguities and asking for clarifications so they can be intelligibly parsed into non-Romance languages? That is SO cool.
And I suppose eventually crowdsourced 'proper' translations like Slashdot-- Google Translate does that on a granular level already using statistics.... I'm SO EXCITED! I'm going to be able to piss off people on seven continents at once! (They get internet in Antarctica, right?) It's a whole new world!
Oh, um...
3) If I have the annotations turned off- I think it'd be interesting to see a NUMBER or something telling me HOW MANY annotations there are. If it's just 1 or 2 I can probably assume it's a name and location I'm not interested in. But if it's 17...? Gosh, maybe I'll enable 'em again to see what all this extra info is! Heck- how about letting us mouseover the corner button and SHOW the annotations (just when moused over) without actually turning them on-- like "peeking." (Well, don't use that button, that'd be terrible functionality... bu you get the point.) Tics in the progress bar to show me where the added non-video data appears in the timeline so I know when to peek? (I feel like the clickable frames around the smaller videos in 'Hug The World' shouldn't count toward that somehow...)
Did I mention the current menu icons were extremely anti-intuitive? *looks* Yes I did. Hrm. Well... that's pretty much all the feeedback I have then. Good luck changing the world!
(See, I can be nice when I want to.)
And tell me how to turn the damn thing off until it's ready.