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Why? Because its awesome, duh! Okay let me try to come up with actual reasons. In america alone there are about 40 000 000 people that are deaf or hard of hearing. If it is successful this could open up a whole new demographic to FDR. source: http://libguides.gallaudet.edu/content.php?pid=119476&sid=1029190 Wait aren't some videos already closed captioned? Yes but these are few and far between. Usually important messages or more popular videos from my observation have closed captions. To the deaf and hard of hearing most of the content is simply inaccessible. They can use Google's automatic captions, Sayo, dude, we live in the future! Unplug your speakers or mute everything and try to use this feature, sometimes it can give you a general idea of what is going on but more often than not its just broken. Even YouTube themselves have admitted this. check this BBC article out for more on that. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/31004497/youtube-we-know-automatic-subtitles-arent-good-enough "Okay fine but, there are many captioning guidelines to follow and only trained professional captioners know them and they need to be hired for those tasks instead." People (deaf people I have talked to and myself) don't really care for the presence of cryptic captioning syntax when compared to having no captions at all. The main thing is to have a fair idea of what is being said. I have some experience in this as someone who loves anime but can't speak Japanese. I rely heavily on "fansubs" especially for the more obscure shows that you know will never be officially subbed. In fact what I find is that often the "fansubs" are better than the official subs I don't really know why but that's a whole other debate. read more about fansubs here if you interested in some random anime history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fansub Do you even know Stef bro? 50 minute long videos, movie reviews longer than the movie itself and not to mention "The Verbal Acrobatics"; not a good name for a punk band. Ain't nobody got time to caption that! The cool thing about YouTube captions is that contributors can work together even contributing only a few lines at a time and have someone else add to them, edit or review their captions later... We gonna be trolled so hard... Exactly that's why there is a review process and contributors can vote on what subtitles are good. Only when a set of captions gets enough votes is it pushed to the channel owner for final approval and they can still edit them further if they want to. check the video below for more on this process. Maybe the community will take to this idea or maybe not but I don't see what FDR has to lose by turning on the feature. Initially yes, reviewing the captions will be a pain but I think that there is more to be gained in the long run especially if there could be a way to have trusted contributors or some kind of points/reputation system. This feature is new on YouTube so one can only hope that it will mature further and they will add these kind of features down the line. And finally... dessert Don't judge me ok, I'm a young man let me enjoy youth! Watch Deaf vloger Rikki Poynter who inspired me to make this post in the first place below.