https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA
Recently, YouTube has revealed the introduction of YouTube Heroes, a global community of volunteer contributors who help create the best possible YouTube experience for everyone. The idea is to reward certain ‘points’ to users that contribute to the community. Below are some of the actions will earn the users points:
- Accurate reports of videos that violate community guidelines
- Contributing a sentence that gets published as a subtitle
- Answering a user question on the YouTube help forum with a comment selected as Best answer.
Based on these points, users can reach a certain level, which rewards them with incentives such as the ability to Mass flag abusive content and contact YouTube staff directly.
Although the idea behind it seems rather nice; gamify the monotonous aspects of YouTube, the Heroes introduction video led to a mass outrage on the internet. The video, which was released just 2 days ago, already received a massive 350.000+ dislikes, as opposed to 5.000 likes. On top of that, YouTube disabled to ability to comment on the video, seems like they had a lot of trust in it…
“Talk to Youtube staff directly!” Something their content creators should be able to do. This is absurd.” (Reddit user MisterMagicka)
“Look at the dislikes. Seems like “mass flagging videos” sounds good to no one.” (Reddit user Zach)
These two reactions summarize the main issues of most people. It seems strange, that content creators with over hundreds of thousands subscribers struggle to contact YouTube staff directly when facing issues related to privacy and content stealing, while if you add some subtitles and mass report some videos, you’ll receive the privilege to contact them. Instead, these loyal content creators receive automated responses, which in most cases won’t help a thing.
“I can’t wait to flag all the videos that go against my beliefs and opinion.” (Reddit user MasterChrono)
As do all websites with user created content, there are a lot of the so called internet ‘trolls’ on YouTube. These trolls purposely report videos that meet al user guidelines, just because they do not like the content or creator. Rewarding the Heroes with the ability to Mass flag content, will not only make it easier for these trolls to report videos, it will also draw the attention of more trolls.
Incentivizing people to moderate your community without having to pay real moderators and creators seems like a nice idea. But the Heroes incentive makes users do all the boring and non-sexy jobs: Adding subtitles > Translator, Moderate content > Moderator, Test new features before release > Beta tester. Normally, these jobs are paid functions in an organization, done by real employees, but at the so called ‘highest’ hero level, you basically become a Beta Tester without any form of compensation…
All in all, I think the idea of crowdsourcing captioning and subtitles is a great idea. I just don’t think the levelling system and incentives to report are not.
What do you think about YouTube Heroes? Comment below!
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/
