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That seems like a good compromise to me too. I can't say that I'm sad to see the annotations go though, they were so often abused that they were permanently turned off on my side, corrections or otherwise. I'm not generally a an of breaking things for the sake of breaking things but I think it's a good move on Google's part.

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The abuse could've been stopped very easily. The main problem were link annotations, so a simple popup on click, saying "The video wants to redirect you to [url]." "Continue/cancel" would've been enough. Disallowing annotations in a 10% border inside the video and only allowing all annotations to cover at most 50% of the screen on top that would cover all or the cases I can think of.

Limiting their size would cut down on the clickjacking annotations, but wouldn't deal with the hated "buy our merch!" annotations that were damaging to the video content and led to people turning annotations off. I think simply removing all links would be clear and effective, without damaging the error-correction use.

The third common use that I've seen is linking to other videos, and that's the one that YouTube's replacements systems tackle.

Another somewhat noteworthy thing is that the annotation system is tied to YouTube's channel logo overlay. Once the annotations go, it's likely that the logo will not be hideable anymore.

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