Hello insiders this week I have a special guest I've got James who's working on some very important captions planning welcome to the show James. Hey Tom. Thanks for having me. It's good to have you back brother. Now today we're going to talk about community captions and what we're we're going to kind of be a little more transparent than we usually are around some of these types of projects because we're we're taking a hard look on whether we should sort of continue supporting them or not and that's that's a pretty big decision. So maybe can you give folks a little bit of background on what is this feature why did we do it and you know why are we with why are we thinking about it now. Yeah absolutely so first kind of you said before this is something this is a new experiment that we're trying here we do hear pretty often from creators that big decisions get made without necessarily creators feeling like they have a chance to give input so we are using this opportunity to take a step back and ask creators what they think about a decision before it gets made and so we are starting to think about whether or not we continue to have the community captions feature or whether or not it makes sense to shut it down. Before I go into more detail about that let me just kind of clarify a little bit what that means so there are three ways that most creators get captions or subtitles. The first that many of you are probably familiar with are automatic captions and those for a number of languages just happen automatically on your video. Second many of you upload them yourselves in some way shape or form and then the last way is there's a community captions feature that where you can opt in and allow anyone on the internet to come and suggest captions for your video. And it's really the third one that we're wondering if it makes sense to continue or if the effort that would be spent kind of building and maintaining it would be better spent on other features. Right and in fairness it's probably we're leaning in the direction of of deprecating it and so this is a very important conversation because we also know a lot of creators feel passionately about captions. This idea of anyone in the world can help you caption your video and then translate it and make it kind of more accessible is an amazing vision. Like what do you think is driving our contemplation of why we wouldn't continue supporting that feature? I couldn't agree more with how you framed it. The reason that we're considering it ultimately comes down to not that many creators are ultimately using it just to be totally transparent less than one one thousandth of a percent of channels approved a community caption track in the last month. And so we actually went and started the talk with channels about why they aren't using it, particularly ones that had used it in the past or were large enough to have an audience for it. And some of the things that we heard were well I really love that it exists right everyone everyone is positive on the theory and then they said but and they say things like but I've had problems with span or it's not reliable enough for me if we want to have the most accessible product possible for as many different people we want creators to have. And why this possible audience for their videos this community captions feature isn't accomplishing that goal even though it sounds really great in theory. It only works for the biggest channels and then there's problems with spam and abuse and then people turn it off and then consequently it's not on that much watch time so only about 0.2% of watch time has a community caption track on it. And so that's what has this leaning towards actually shutting this this feature down. I guess some people may wonder like hey well just leave it alone just leave it as is like why don't you just you don't have to spend any more time on it like just let it be unfortunately that's that's not the reality I think it is there's some pretty significant costs to keeping it and I think we have a responsibility to make sure that we're investing in the places that will have the most kind of return on investment here. I totally get where you're coming from and I hope others who are listening understand too like part of the reason for this video is to say hey look if there's an angle we haven't thought about you know of course we're going to keep an open mind but we we ultimately want to do the best thing for the creator ecosystem overall what where we going with with the future of our captions roadmap. Yeah I'm glad you asked so we absolutely are not getting rid of the ability for a creator to upload captions or translations to their channel like that's not even in the consideration set. There's a bunch of work that's continuing to happen on automatic captions making them more accurate supporting more languages making them better support kind of punctuation and grammar capitalization and stuff like that. We're coming at this from wanting to have the most accessible platform possible it's really about how do we get there in a way that's safe for the platform safe for creators and you know these are these are the hard questions. Yeah that's a great point about the trade-offs because if you're hearing this and you're like well I vote for keeping it what you're also voting for is less improvements to the experience for creators to upload their own captions. Less improvements on the automated captions less improvements on the ability to refine the automated captions setting aside this community caption stuff when you think about where you'd like to see captions go forward. What are some of the things that you're kind of excited for us as a team to consider we are working on a new captions editor that I am really. I'm going to put up a pump for we actually have some creators out there using a alpha version for the first time right now i'm really excited to see a tighter integration between what the creator does and auto captions and maybe the creator auto captions and Google translate there's opportunities maybe to extend some of our permission tools some of the creators I spoke to is that well actually I don't use the project the project the way you intend. I have my three people that caption all my videos and I only approve things that they write and I would much rather just be able to send them an invite from permissions. You know to be able to kind of access only the captions and that would be a better workflow for me and my team with that said are there any other questions that you have James that you want to hear from the audience that they can give us feedback on in terms of how we're thinking about this. Yeah we would love it if people would weigh in here the best type of feedback you can give us this information about why and how it would affect your channel if you don't think that we should do this one more thing if I could I do want to just say we realize this is a tough conversation and we think thank you guys for having it with us you know James it just occurred to me that the other thing that we should mention is that this is a bit more. A new format of an insider video like usually it's hey here's some cool new stuff coming this one is a little bit further upstream in the product development process and so if you guys watching this have feedback on you know if you want to see this much of the sausage making like you know we could try and do more of it I think the risk is always like well you're never going to make everyone happy and then people are going to be pissed if you go in a different direction. I think we're taking a bet here that being more transparent and putting all the cards on the table may help us make a better decision based on the input. Yeah this is brand new first time we've done something like this at least as far as I know so make sure you subscribe to creator insider if you want to go behind the curtain and really get involved in our product development. This is definitely inside baseball stuff but hopefully some people find it helpful. All right you guys keep it real we'll see you next time thanks James.