prnt.sc/ektoxu
SON OF A BITCH

YOU DON MESSED UP YOUTUBE

FIRST YOU FIRE YOUR BIGGEST STAR

THEN YOU PULL THIS SHIT

To elaborate; The Annotations on youtube.com have been used for a wide variety of purposes. From informing people that since the video was uploaded the creator had disabled comments to pointing stuff out that might have been missed.

Youtube, on the other hand, think they were just used to keep people on your channel, and so are scrapping it but hey at least you can have fucking end cards, not like youtubers have been doing this for years prior.

You've never had to deal with google's design policy have you? It's: "We're making something new. Your tears may be deposited in the barrel on the left, where we keep our those sharp point fragments of things, otherwise known as documentation."

Is this really a surprise?

I'll grant you, this doesn't seem like the smartest decision, but its probably not all that terrible...

The day they scrap the video description feature is the day when panic is justified.

That's next month.

I'm not in the least bit surprised, nearly every feature-changing update to YouTube has been negative.

Still disappointed at the YouTube staff's utter incompetence. Like, from every single perspective it would have made more sense to try and make annotations work on mobile devices than to yank the feature out - it's an existing feature that loads of people use, half the work is already there...

Instead, we get "This feature doesn't work on mobile and we're lazy fucks. Let's scrap the feature."

Really? I'd heard it wasn't going to happen until September...

*hugs*
don't worry, they'll realize that they done fucked up when pretty much all of youtube creators cry out against it.

Like they did with Youtube Heroes?

*cough*Facetious question is facetious.*cough*

Should probably keep this in general news thread.

That was my first thought

I mean, youtube got rid of, or hid very, very well the ability to send users messages, and I can only find my inbox at all through a nest of links three deep. They have barbaric DMCA policies that allow for consequence free abuse and bullying, demonitize videos that discuss controversial topics, force a style of buffering that prevents people with slow internet from pre-buffering a video to watch it smoothly, and allow a sensational dying newspaper's mad ravings dictate who they work with or not, but yeah no, getting rid of annotations is just the worst.

Seriously though, Youtube seems like it's trying everything in it's power to be the worst possible service imaginable, and I can't help but think that it's their utter lack of real competition that is the source of their attitude. Sometimes it feels like most of the things they do are done for two reasons; one, *just* to test and see if people will still put up with it and if any competing sites do pop up as a threat to their monopoly, or two, to avoid doing any real work themselves.

YouTube isn't trying to be a service for your sake; it's being a business. They're focusing more on babies playing with their parents' iPads than anyone else because those babies generate appealing metrics for advertisers. Parents don't like their babies seeing curse words from strangers in their inbox. Babies don't know how to turn off annotations and cry when their screens are blocked by the big mean wordboxes.