YouTube is silently deleting uploaded SRV3 (styled) subtitles

wpm · 2026-01-19T05:28:36 1768800516

Subtitles are parsed by their LLMs for the pointless summaries placed right below the video and for all the other boring, dumb stuff YT does with AI.

See: https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8 (Poisoning AI with ".ass" Subtitles)

kingstnap · 2026-01-19T10:10:50 1768817450

They aren't useless, it's nice for finding timestamps of things, especially in long content like talks.

wpm · 2026-01-20T07:08:55 1768892935

So...something you could do with the browser's built-in ability to parse text files, which YouTube could simply serve the subtitles to you as?

aurareturn · 2026-01-19T09:40:37 1768815637

Is it pointless? I find myself asking for summaries of videos more and more often.

wpm · 2026-01-20T07:09:49 1768892989

You should find yourself asking if those summaries are actually accurate, faithful summaries of the video content at all.

Like, is reading a digest version of War and Peace the same thing as War and Peace?

aurareturn · 2026-01-20T12:39:12 1768912752

For videos with low enough importance, I do not care if the LLM makes a mistake here and there.

For videos where with high importance to me, I can watch it myself.

expedition32 · 2026-01-19T12:03:24 1768824204

Ha hilarious all these content creators started making long rambling videos to make more advertising money.

I have always maintained that I can read text faster but literacy is going down the drain.

ggm · 2026-01-19T01:25:58 1768785958

I could believe this is a filter designed to simplify conformance to some YT standard.

I could believe this is a side effect of something else.

I could believe its a problem with some output devices (sw) of the nature of "oh I'm ASCII I can't handle UTF-8 encoded data" which doesn't have a good default.

Is there some more direct profit/IPR motivated approach which directs this format of all others should be removed?

altairprime · 2026-01-19T02:52:05 1768791125

It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all. So, just as with Crunchyroll, better to kill the complex human artistic subtitles so that people don’t get used to their boring “could be machine, could be human, who cares” slop (and, as a bonus, so that human moderators aren’t required to evaluate whether the subtitles are offensively shaped).

CamperBob2 · 2026-01-19T05:04:58 1768799098

It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all.

Well, that certainly remains to be seen.

altairprime · 2026-01-19T05:22:16 1768800136

Indeed. Fortunately, “cannot” is present tense, not future tense.

efilife · 2026-01-19T01:44:40 1768787080

this just keeps happening over and over. And I can't find any logical reason why they are doing this. Surely you can't lose money due to supporting a colorful subtitles format? Ditch youtube. You most likely do NOT need it

its-summertime · 2026-01-19T03:05:32 1768791932

They still support multiple formats with color information

slowdog · 2026-01-19T04:55:04 1768798504

Even still, it's not as much information and doesn't excuse deleting creators work without any warning.

ompogUe · 2026-01-19T03:35:43 1768793743

Not sure on their reasoning, but subtitle files _are_ an attack vector:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-one-batt...

https://mashable.com/article/subtitles-hackers

quietsegfault · 2026-01-19T04:38:59 1768797539

I mean, it’s sort of a vector. The malware itself can only be executed if you click a suspicious .lnk file. The moral here isn’t that subtitles are a “vector”, but to not indiscriminately run scripts.

pfannkuchen · 2026-01-19T06:42:36 1768804956

> Sure, it's not officially supported or even documented

Conspiracy, or P3 bug?