Tuesday, November 1, 2016

We Got A Meowing Captioning Problem

A member of our Caption Action 2 Facebook group brought a form of caption vandalism to our attention.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/captionaction2/permalink/1201934816548550/

Imagine someone talking, but instead of normal captioning, cat-related words are in there. In this case, the award-winning Phillip DeFranco  YouTube channel. His October 27 video is loaded with cat-related words. One scene has these captions:

"And the first thing we're going to talk about today, the most meowed story of the day."

...and in another scene...

"(sarcastically) I'm going to be like *meow-lodramatic gasp*"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQIfSnK10UE
 

...and he's not even making those sounds, not even a little mew, not even referring to anything related to cats. This form of captioning vandalism is going to get worse before it gets better. I've seen this before in the past.

I could be wrong, but it looks like it's a group of trolls called the "meowers." If you do a Google search on "Usenet meow wars," there are a few pages that tell about this. I've personally seen it happen when they've taken over a thread with "meowing." I used to be active on the newsgroups.

The articles you read of them demolishing the Usenet newsgroups are true. The last I saw of things on Usenet some time ago, groups were either spammed or meowed/cascaded into near-unusability. By cascaded or cascading, imagine a response where there's a response below it with another response below it, and so on, all meows or just plain trolling or some useless spam messages.

The surviving newsgroups survived on moderation and people sending commands to remove those particular messages.

One of the articles mentions Hipcrime. He put me and multiple others on a list some years ago called a "BlueList of Complainers" and a couple others, and it wasn't for meowing. It was pretty funny. That plus other rather funny and not-so-funny things.

Fortunately for this particular video, they didn't "meow" everything.

But it's only a matter of time...

Are you annoyed/outraged by this? Do something about it! Tell Philip DeFranco about it:

Twitter: @phillyd
Email: philipdefranco@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DeFrancoNation/
Tumblr: http://defranco.tumblr.com/
and post comments on the video as well.

Update: Check his video on Facebook. It doesn't have the meows.

https://www.facebook.com/DeFrancoNation/videos/10154692538944407/