So, instead of fixing community captions and making it more user-friendly and more visible-- YouTube is just axing the whole project.

If you actively makes it difficult for people to find ways to add community captions-- of course no one submits. That's a UI flaw.

And if the captioning interface itself so horrible, people rather use Aegisub, Amara, VREW, ArcTime etc-- then you have a UX problem.

Here is the source to YouTube's announcement that they are decommissioning community captions: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/61967856?hl=en

But honestly, it's not hard to investigate why YouTubers hate Google's version of captioning-- and discover what software they use.

And most of the features from those software could be added to Google's own system. (I tried them)

(I am aware there is rumor channel owners will be able to grant permission to volunteers-- I am just addressing this: "rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time)".

Yeah, your web design is awful

But Google has a habit of doing this kind of stuff-- they will start an awesome project, makes it functionally useless, then complain no one uses it and kill it: https://killedbygoogle.com/ 

Worst design ever. For a platform where everything has to be done on desktop, where 70%-80% of Internet activity on YouTube is done on mobile devices.

YouTube actively hides this feature.

The CC function is tucked away, a lot of people don't even know how to turn them on. Which results in harassment campaigns.

And because the closed caption UI on YouTube is garbage, sometimes you will find random videos like this where the uploader burned in a reminder to turn on the subtitles / CC and instruct them on how to turn on the subtitles.

(taken from channel "JOLLY")

And if you look for tutorials on subtitling softwares like EZTitles (has a neat feature automatically detect scene cuts), Amara, Aegisub, VREW (vlogs will be in Korean), ArcTime (vlogs will be in Mandarin or Cantonese)-- you will see Google is complicit in making shitty products

At the risk of being a boomer, if abusive fan-subbers are a problem, why not remove the anonymity? We used to know who were responsible for terrible translations and time-coding.

Or allow fan-subbers to rename their files.

Here is me renaming a caption file to "English - GLOSS"

Most YouTubers don't know they can rename their fan-submitted subtitle tracks. It took me long time to realize-- after I noticed anthropologists were adding endangered languages and it's something only channel owners have access to.

Fan-subbers can't even rename their own files.