YouTube is dead - thank you YouTube.
I hate this feature and I wished YouTube would get rid of it or provide a way to disable it. This is the kind of dictation that reduces the overall user experience.
When I wrote my post on the YouTube auto dubbing I couldn’t imagine thanking YouTube for this feature. YouTube lost their soul throughout the years with strange business decisions, their push against ad blockers, and awful creator support. Just to mention a few.
Since a few days I now get auto dubbed videos (English videos dubbed to German). And I couldn’t believe how bad this is. I simply started laughing1. It’s so bad, I can’t watch these videos at all2. Initially, I thought this is only for YouTube shorts, but now it’s also being added to longer videos. Sometimes there’s the possibility to switch back to original audio3. Yet by now, every time I get a dubbed video, I simply stop the playback. I think about it for a moment and then decide to close the YouTube app. There’s so much more interesting stuff I can spend my time on, that I’m unironically thankful for YouTube for introducing this “amazing” feature. I hope that until YouTube rolls the feature back, I already lost interest in YouTube altogether
The first time I encountered this was with a video that was playing in the background and I thought it’s one of these awful scam/ad shorts that get produced somewhere and then dubbed with AI. ↩︎
It is so uncomfortable/awkward: I clicked on a video of one of my long-time subscriptions, and then I see them with a different voice, badly translated and synced without any emotions. ↩︎
From a product standpoint I still don’t understand how this could possibly introduce more view(er)s? I also don’t understand why this is the default option and not the other way around. ↩︎