#caption squad pls unionize etc

[yonpote]

omg i just realized i never talked about the whole captioning thing on here

so Before I Deleted Twitter™ i went on a huge rant about how dnp have used fans to caption their videos for years, and while before it was thru the youtube community captioning system, now that feature is gone they have just been straight up relying on fans to caption everything for them for free and how that's kinda fucked ESPECIALLY because so many youtubers after the community captions thing was gone, went to hire either a professional company or other PAID methods of getting captions for their videos.

if anyone goes back to watch an older dnp video and turn captions, you may notice that they used to have kinda weird things in them. this was back when Anyone could upload captions to any video, so people would throw in phandom memes, inside jokes, their own commentary on the video, etc. completely defeating the purpose of captions that are supposed to be JUST what you hear in the video. the current captioning squad has really made it so that captions on new videos are accurate and not just complete nonsense and have become basically essential people for dnp.

tbh i would say most youtubers don't even bother with captions and just have the auto-generated ones which sucks, but like. bros can afford to pay people for captions. channels much smaller than theirs do! it's wonderful that this dedicated group of people who speak different languages all decided to make dan and phil's videos more accessible! like, captions are an accessibility feature plain and simple. people who are d/Deaf, hard of hearing, don't speak the native language, have an audio processing disorder, or even just have to watch the video on silent or low volume for some reason, have to rely on captions and the fact that dnp don't pay people for this is shitty.

the two options they have is either pay a professional captioning company to do captions, or pay the fans who are already doing this. but if they go with the former, that may mean they won't go through to make sure the captions are done in all the languages currently being done. which is why i really hope they consider going with the latter. idk everyone in the captioning squad, but i know for a fact many of them have full-time jobs, so captioning is just a thing they do on the side out of passion and wanting dnp to be accessible in their own spoken languages. so considering just how long many of them have been doing this, i think they deserve to be compensated for. it's been really fuckin cool to see that dnp have started working with well known and talented fanartists and have paid them well, and i think that should extend to the captioners.