There's a Firefox extension (also available for Chrome) that turns off automatic translations and dubbing [1]
Moments like these really make me appreciate the customizability of the web experience for advanced users.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
So at this point, to use YT you need:
- Ublock origin. - Sponsorblock. - DeArrow. - Youtube no translation
At what point do we collectively decide to no longer patch over enshittified bullshit?
I also use an extension to stop automatically playing a video when I open it and another to stop automatically opening the next recommended video when the current one ends.
Auto play should be configurable in the browser. In Firefox: Settings->Search "permissions". Autoplay is one of the options and can be controlled on a per-site basis (I have it disabled globally).
I have autoplay turned off in Safari, but the esteemed minds at YouTube have somehow found a way to circumvent that setting. Like the person you're replying to, I had to resort to an extension to get the site to stop auto playing videos.
It would be great if companies content creators ag least used PeerTube additionally.
we need a yt deshitter for (maybe one exists?): when mousing over the seek-bar, the time displayed goes from the time where im hovering over, to a huge-chunk of the bar displaying 'most replayed' in several areas (not just one, which "most" implies)
I pay for YouTube premium, and my experience is fairly smooth.
Is there a premium option to turn off the auto dubbing? It's incredibly jarring to hear a computer voice instead of a YouTubers
Also are you just skipping sponsor breaks manually? I use premium but it only covers adblocking really.
Sponsor breaks? Like creators having sponsored portions of videos? Yeah that is still there and obviously YT has no control over that.
Premium users still get auto dubs, still cannot completely disable auto play, still cannot completely hide Shorts.
It’s amazing how UX hostile companies can get when they don’t have real competition.
My YouTube does not auto-play, so not sure what you mean by that. Also the ability to "hide shorts" isn't a feature I'd expect from any other web platform out-of-the-box, so definitely didn't expect to get it with my Premium subscription.
Wrt auto-dubs, they can be turned off. To me this feels less deliberately hostile on YT's part and more tunnel vision where they assumed everyone would find this to be a helpful feature and didn't even think about adding a user-level preference to disable it.
But also I find user-level preferences kinda an anti-pattern anyway. Would be nice if you disable it for one video and it just remembers that preference for the next one (or vice versa).
By auto-play I mean in the feed, there’s an option to stop it from doing that, but after a while YouTube decides to turn it on again. It also has an option to hide Shorts, but same thing, they simply ignore it. About the dub thing, I get it could be tunnel vision coming from english-only speakers, it didn’t occurred to them that outside their circles is common for people to be bilingual or even multilingual, but that auto dub thing hasn’t been fixed for years there are tons of complains, the way I “fixed” it was setting my language to English, but from time to time I get my own language dubbed to English.
Auto play as in the video starts playing immediately when you load the page, not auto play as in automatically play the next video. Only the latter is configurable by the user. YT even circumvents the browser's own auto play configuration, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread.
Network effects are incredibly difficult to overcome. Bluesky is the only example that I can think of that came close in recent memory, but fell victim to an extreme userbase and now is experiencing degrowth. Similar things happened to all the (many) times someone tried to create reddit without the reddit.
I guess Kick is an example, but that's not exactly a model to follow unless you're also a questionably ethical casino with deep pockets who wants to be able to advertise to young men.
YouTube has to become truly awful for a new long-form video content platform to gain a lot of traction. Think of how long Windows has been enshittifying for and how slow the move from it has been.
I heard that from a small Italian YouTuber who does cooking videos (Tortellino) who apologized yesterday for his video that was transformed without his knowledge and consent.
Apparently his (average) Italian accent, plus simple Italian words (spaghetti and similar ones) triggered a robotic voice that "improved" his accent and translated the Italian words.
This is insane.
> ... The voice generators used by YouTube sound extremely robotic and are sometimes accelerated to 1.5 times the original speed
This might only apply to German, notorious for requiring more syllables to convey a given idea than, say, French or English.
Nevertheless, it's absurd that YouTube doesn't provide an easier way to disable this "feature".
I noticed the same with German. And often generators have to wait because some important piece of the sentence has to be at the end in German. It's happening less in Dutch videos
I can understand why it automatically being on and coming back on would be annoying.
But the auto-dub feature itself is amazing. As an english only speaker (with a bit of german) I'm loving that now I can directly listen to Brazillian hot air balloon underground art scene videos in Portuguese, among others. Having the auto-generated subtitles was good, but now with auto-dubs it's even better. These auto-translations features really are bringing the world together in the ways the internet always promised. That's a good thing. I never would've interacted with many of these people if not for the auto translation (both ways).
Dubbing in general is a horrid practice. People's voices and speech mannerisms are a big part of their personality and presence. Hiding it behind someone else's voice (or an auto-generated translation) just erases a huge part of who the other person is, for no good reason in a world where virtually everyone can read subtitles.
Imagine listening to "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse", but instead of Marlon Brandon's iconic performance, you get someone speaking another language, or an AI generated voice: you'd lose half the point of the scene.
The dubs are not replacing the actual audio track. Both tracks are available if you want the original because you understand that language. You can just pick using the options menu (the gear).
The problem is that people are picking and then youtube is ignoring that on future videos and reloads instead of storing the preference.
The problem is not the availability of the auto-dubs as an option, which are undeniably great and helpful when you don't understand the language. I agree re: entertainment movies, dubs are bad. But sometimes in video media, often in fact, the speech is not about the person emoting but instead about what they are saying (ie, documentaries, reviews, etc).
You can still listen to the original audio and look at subtitles if you don't understand the language. It's so dehumanizing to auto generate a replacement of the original voice. I would really hate to know that I went through the trouble of recording and sharing something for free and people were listening to an AI rendition of what I was saying.
Yeah. I personally self-host my videos that I send to people on IRC/email/etc. Easy solution if you don't like what a free corporate service is doing. It would be nice if Alphabet's Google's Youtube also offered an option to disable it for one's own account's videos.
But I will never agree that auto-translations are a bad thing. They open the world up beyond language barriers. And that's good. Just because "AI" is involved does not make it bad, even if you're sick of it being shoved down your throat in contexts like Tik-Instagram-whatever.
In the web version it is unavoidable only in the native app you can change to the original audio.
P.S. I uninstalled the YouTube app because of YouTube Shorts and had to reinstall the app to listen to videos in the original audio.
If you want to block YouTube shorts just pause your watch history and clear entire history. It turns off all recommendations including shorts. You can subscription tab without any issue
install revanced (if you're on android): https://github.com/ReVanced
it is something that allows you to make your youtube experience much, much nicer (such as removing shorts off the app).
I can easily change to original audio in my third-party app. I love using it while smoking my new pipe.
To make matters worse, on mobile web there is no way of turning this off or switching the audio track at all :(
I was watching a YouTube (Michael Hendrix) and wanted to cast to my TV, which replaced him with a strange Japanese voice or something.
Such typical Google arrogance.
Want to know what annoys users more than robotic translation? A screen-sized cookie dialogue without the option to reject all, that requires you to go through numerous forms before you can see the website content.
No way am I reading that slop.
you know what annoys users more than broken arm? a splinter! (and i fact i do have a splinter in my hand right now).
Fuck multilinguals I guess.