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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.

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).
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.

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.
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
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.
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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 pay for YouTube premium, and my experience is fairly smooth.
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.

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)
> ... 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
Such typical Google arrogance.
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.