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."

Comments

I would just be happy

[OYAHHH]

If they would stop placing the links to additional videos during the last few seconds of the video I am watching. Is this the popup annotations as described?

Regardless, it is highly annoying to have additional video icons displayed prior to the end of the video I am watching. These "adverts" block some pretty interesting material in many cases.

Re:I would just be happy

[lgw]

The were abused badly. Hidden rectangles that covered e.g. the volume control tht linked to "subscribe", for example. This is why we can't have nice things.

Which sucks, because YouTube has no good way to edit a video once posted (much like Slashdot), so annotations were the one way you could correct a stupid mistake after the fact, by popping up a correction as you said the stupid thing.

Re:I would just be happy

[DarkRookie2]

I am pretty sure they were removed mostly in part is that they didn't work all that great on mobile

Re:I would just be happy

[The Original CDR]

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..

Sometimes the annotations are awesome.

[Killall -9 Bash]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Whoever sent you this link is doing you a massive fucking favor.

Good-bye Kaizo Trap

[tepples]

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.

Good fucking riddance!

[Sebby]

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?!?

Re:Add missing information

[Sigma 7]

People always correct what they said, provide links to their new video about a topic or whatever.

If only there was a place where they could write some text to provide some errata. Maybe it could be placed below the video, perhaps after the major title, and account that uploaded the video... placing it before the comments...

It would be quite a useful feature if it were implemented. /s

But really, I've seen obnoxious use of annotations outnumber the proper use.

Re:Why not just default to off

[Pezbian]

Somehow, whenever I visit Youtube, I have to go to settings to switch annotations off (no, I don't want to 'log-in'). Why don't they just default to off, instead of scrapping the entire feature?

That's as likely as Facebook defaulting your feed to "Most Recent".