Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Why Adding Annotations to YouTube Videos is Stupid

Yes, we've all seen the incredibly attractive offer of adding customizable annotations to our uploaded YouTube videos. Perhaps some of you have tried it. For those of you have avoided this, good job because they're stupid.
Basically, annotations are little blocks of text- messages that "add" to the video in some way- that you can put in different types of speech bubbles. Anyone who uploads a video or who has permission from the uploader can do it to a video.
However, these things are extremely, unbearably, harassingly annoying. If you're trying to watch a decent video about say, dinosaurs and a block of text that says, "SUBSCRIBE!" suddenly pops up from a desperate user, you're damn right it'll ruin the appeal of the video. It interrupts all the important content in the video. In fact, I don't really see much reason why these annotations can't simply be added into the description to not interfere.
There's no appropriate situation for this horrible offense. Annotations are just wrong. Don't fall into their trap.

1 comment:

Kieran Durcan said...

I totally agree with you. I set up an account on YouTube specifically for the function of changing the annotations settings, now the annoying little things never come up again!