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YouTube Will Remove All Pop-up Annotations on January 15 (engadget.com)
Early last year, YouTube announced that it would be retiring annotations, those boxes that pop up during a video with links and additional information. It discontinued the annotations editor in May of last year and soon all existing annotations will be going away as well. From a report: The company added an update to the help page announcing the end of its annotations editor, saying, "We will stop showing existing annotations to viewers starting January 15, 2019. All existing annotations will be removed."
Annotations work great on the desktop. Not so much on mobile. And mobile is where most videos are being watched these days. Mobile also has no ad blockers to prevent ads from being shown..
There is a guy who i subscribe to who uses annotations to point to previous videos that he makes reference to (even points to the top of the screen when he makes them) to give you more context on what they are talking about, it's a pity they are retiring it as they are useful. I can understand that they want the platform to the same across any device but if that's the case why do i need to pay for youtube red if i want to minimize the app on my phone? i can minimise the tab in my browser on my computer.
Removing annotations will break the concept of Kaizo Trap and other interactive works that use YouTube as a substitute for the deprecated Adobe Flash Player.
I've found it incredibly stupid to have those popup in the middle of a video - what am I supposed to do with those? Click on them, thereby stop watching what I currently want to watch before it's done?!?
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