I’m done. Time to cancel my YouTube subscription.
I’ve reached my breaking point with YouTube. Over the past year, they’ve introduced the “Auto-dubbed” feature. A textbook example of how to damage the user experience.
Now, Italian video titles are automatically translated into English, and the audio is replaced with a flat, robotic English voice that strips away the original tone and context. The issue is even worse in YouTube Shorts, where the option to revert to the original language often doesn’t work at all.
But the final straw came today: before boarding a flight back to Italy, I downloaded a few videos to watch offline, only to find that the Italian audio wasn’t retained in the downloads.
Users should at least be given the choice to opt out of auto-dubbing and stick with the original content.
PS: If you know someone at YouTube, please pass this along. The experience is genuinely poor for multilingual users—and it’s disappointing to see a platform I used to love take this direction.
Time to cancel my subscription.