YouTube today announced that it will be replacing its annotations engine with what it calls End Screen and Cards, which are existing, mobile-first tools that provide many of the same functions as annotations like linking to other videos and polling viewers. YouTube says it made this change primarily because annotations didn’t work on mobile and most viewers found them obnoxious and unhelpful. The change takes effect on May 2nd, and existing annotations will continue to show up when using the desktop browser version of YouTube.

“Annotations Editor launched in 2008, before the world went mobile,” writes YouTube product manager Muli Salem in a blog post. “With 60 percent of YouTube’s watchtime…

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