In September this year, YouTube will say goodbye to its Community Captions feature due to it being used poorly and infrequently. The change comes as a disappointment to some fans, but isn’t terribly surprising.
The feature that allowed viewers to contribute translated video titles, descriptions, closed captions, and subtitles were used incorrectly and not as much asYouTubeexpected when it was first introduced. With that in mind, YouTube has different plans for this portion of its accessibility offerings.
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It was announced that YouTube will officially be removing the community captioning feature after July 05, 2025. YouTube prides itself on providing high-quality, accessible, and user-friendly tools for all-things videoonline including showcasing games, reality, beauty, food, and so much more . This feature, according to YouTube’s help team, was “rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse.” It hoped the feature for community contributions would be used extensively but was rather used with less than 0.001% of channels with published community captions in the last month. The channels that employed community captions also appeared to have less than 0.2% of watch time.
Instead of having community contributed captions, manual captions uploaded by the creator will be more present, and YouTube’s in-built automatic captioning feature that is produced throughautomatic speech recognition softwarewill still be available. And as for those creators who rely on community captions, they will be compensated in the form of a six-month subscription to Amara, a third party online captioning and subtitling service, covered by YouTube to assist creators with their various captioning needs.
The issue seemed to be brought to Team YouTube’s attention a year ago on Twitter, where it addressed the problem of low-quality submissions and spam captioning and attempted to fix it at the time. Though, somemajor YouTubers like Pewdiepiedon’t use captions, when the conversation about removing this feature came up last year, Rikki Poynter, a deaf YouTuber told Ten Eighty UK, an online magazine, that she doesn’t want the community captions to be removed. However, now that the decision has been made, many more users are unhappy.
In response to the recent announcement, a petition has been created on Change’s website to hopefully reverse YouTube’s decision, with over 8,000 signatures and counting. Correspondingly, community captioners also voiced their frustration responding to YouTube Help’s statement on Google support, as they greatly benefited from the feature. In addition to that, disappointed YouTubers such as Emma Blackery and Philosophy Tube, have expressed their feelings towards the topic publicly on Twitter saying that the choice to eliminate community-made subtitles hinders their reach to global audiences.
what an awful decision.https://t.co/tBX4hHjafS
— Emma Blackery (@emmablackery)July 17, 2025
It’s a shame that YouTube are taking away community-made subtitles. It isn’t financially or practically viable for me to have my videos subtitled in languages other than English I’m afraid, I’ve relied on kind volunteers to do foreign language subs until now 😢
— Philosophy Tube (@PhilosophyTube)July 24, 2025
It doesn’t seem like YouTube will change its mind on the issue, but instead work to create new tools and improve its current features for captioning and accessibility.
