YouTube Community goes beyond video
youtube-creators.googleblog.com
youtube-creators.googleblog.com
- Have a general-purpose social network, but bootstrapped from a userbase where it can be welcome rather than vilified (unlike Buzz, Google+, etc.)
- Stop the slow trickle of (duplicative, cross-pollinated) traffic from the Youtube community to other platforms, because their own platform is lacking (they needed Twitter-like micro-announcements badly)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that have done video from the beginning but are expected to develop a similar direction (Twitch)
- Better arm themselves against other sites that didn't start off with video but have branched out into it (Facebook & subsidiaries, Twitter & subsidiaries, Tumblr, most other social networks these days)
Hopefully this also stops the (IMO, frankly irrational [1][2][3]) speculation that Twitter will be bought out by Google.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418727#12420732 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083561#12083975 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913828#11914620
I think most content producers have wised up to this and diversify their audience over multiple platforms. If you rely on the income putting all your eggs in the YouTube basket is a massive risk until they clean up their processes (there are many automated and social methods to do some of this but they seem completely uninterested in doing it).
Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?
Can you provide some examples of "censorship"? They do have policies that things like graphic content or spam is not permitted and will be removed from the site, but I think that's reasonable.
> It seems even the stars of the platform who often share managers and production companies with other stars have difficulty getting in touch with YouTube to resolve issues.
YouTube provides email support with a 1-business day response time to all creators [1], and the bigger channels get their own Partner Managers [2].
[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083671
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3545535?hl=en
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/benefit-levels.html?noap...
Multiple demonetized channels have stated that they have not received responses via the official support channels. It's all well and good stating a 1-business day response time, but if Youtube doesn't follow through that, where does that leave the content creators?
It's like businesses with support response SLAs that are cleared by the sending of a robo-email from their support system. No actual support has been rendered.
Even if they are different accounts and this guy isn't a Google employee they haven't presented any other credible evidence for this wonderful support anyway. They have only presented a policy aspiration. Google is not Amazon; Google is notorious for bad customer support. Our prior belief for "will YouTube provide good support" shouldn't be very high given they are part of Google. Therefore it doesn't take many data points in the direction of poor support to confirm that.
There are clear and sometimes good reasons for what Google does, it's a great company with competent employees but let's not drink the Kool-Aid and pretend they have great customer support just because there is a policy document aspiring to have good response times.
>Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?
It happens all the time when content creators are using content under fair use. Jim Sterling goes over demonetisation with ContentID [1] and latest changes [2] in his videos. I don't know if he have used that email support, but it would be fair to assume that he have tried and gave up.
[0] https://youtu.be/aQVMnW6LGfM?t=222
if you put blacklisted words in your tags, description or title your video gets demonitized. It isn't censorship of content whatsoever.
Did you really think youtube bots were watching every second of monetized content looking for the f-word?
I was never bothered to register, hence I assume reducing friction might increase my spend on educainment.
What I really want though, is proper commenting system under videos.
I'm curious to know what you mean by that?
As far as youtube comments being the butt-end of jokes about bad comments, I think this is just due to the fact that video is the great common denominator (and thus, the intellectual filter is very very low). Reddit's r/videos is limited to "non-political" videos for much the same reasons (and given that r/politicalvideos is... well, let's say the comment quality is not consistent.
I don't really see how this can be improved: a voting system won't filter low-effort/common denominator comments if what the majority wants is low effort comments.
Or just if the mass of low effort comments is too large. And since low effort is easy to make, the mass will be large.
CGPGrey on what kind of ideas/memes spread faster: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry
H3h3 on the insane number of views on 'minecraft sex' videos (which is exactly the kind of thing I mean when taking about common denominator): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3LhrbSp6Mw
And then there's the lessons of Twitch Plays Pokemon: they had to remove the ability to request multiple keypresses at once because people kept stalling (start10) for example.
It's a commenting system without the pretty standard minimum feature set pretty much every other commenting system has.
Most likely to contain flame wars. We're dealing with base level humanity on YouTube. You have to enact these sort of constraints to keep things tolerable.
It seems like they may as well just remove commenting, at that point.
Currently, the system rather seems to encourage flame wars then to prevent them. You might not find the comment that you were planning to reply - but you'll always find some comment that you can spray fresh vitriol on.
Finally, as a constraint I find the design odd - it doesn't actually prevent you from doing anything, it just makes an arbitrary set of actions unnecessarily hard.
As for receiving a reply, I know that you get a notification, at least if people use your +name in their comment, but it isn't easy to manage given the lack of history, as you pointed out.
as i see it: Youtube comments are not intended to be something that adds value to the video, it is supposed to be a feedback mechanism for the one who posted the video
Yeah. Compared to a forum written in, say, 1995, it's kind of a joke.
Edit: Youtube would never do that, because reading comments distracts from watching videos which reduces ad revenue.
My guess is that it's just impossible to regulate. Take a website that has state of the art threading, karma system and all that: reddit.
AskReddit threads sometimes get to 10k comments, it's just impossible to read through (the bottom 5k comments will never get read, much less upvoted). And people on Reddit sometimes say that their inbox "blew up" and what not when they get a 100 responses (which is a lot really).
Can you imagine youtube-level traffic? Imagine a video with 1M views (which is really not a crazy number by youtube standards): if 1% of users dislike your comment enough to reply to it, you'll get 10k responses! Even if we cut this number by 10 (assuming that 9/10 users either don't bother reading or replying to your comment), you'd still get 1k comments. Even a tenth of that feels like a large amount.
Now, also imagine people being able to read through your comment history and go on witch-hunts like people on Reddit sometimes do (and which every moderator tries to prevent), but on youtube audience scales. Oh god…
Just like with any old primitive forum.
I'd love to have a personalized filter to hide low effort comments and posts automatically, both on YT and Reddit.
It would be doable using machine learning to assign a low effort/meme score to comments. Posts could be scored by the average time it takes users to see it. If it is a gif, image or clip under 1 minute - it's almost 100% fluff.
For something machine learning, well if it'd need to train on your preferences all the way from character-lvl to your preferences, maybe its too expensive to do it for all users.
On the other hand, if it tries to learn just a smallish matrix of general purpose features for everyone (how exactly? to predict votes? or unsupervised?), embedded in the say JSON-LD of each comment, and then just a simple shallow regression model on your history of voting conditioned on that matrix, maybe that can scale?
Hank green made a video lately about how people should reply with + to a post they like instead of up voting and the top comments on recent videos are now far far better than ever before.
I don't know if YouTube made their algorithm bad on purpose to stir controversy which would stir usage but they really need to fix it.
They could also do things like global karma that makes all your posts naturally higher or lower ranking so that people that constantly troll get buried immediately on every video instead of always enjoying attention on comments before they get down voted.
Else people that tend to create substantial on-point comments will get swamped with say funny or snarky one-liner producers even worse than now, as those are much easier to digest and, being devoid of opinion, much easier to upvote.
For one, that it's somehow and for whatever reason linked together with Google+. Far too often, I have to read through a sea of +-syntax, which makes no sense from the YouTube-side. And when people share a YouTube-video on Google+, apparently the text with what they've shared it, shows up in the YouTube-comments. I don't need to know that jeffmeyers told +sandrasmith, +thomasthomasson and +phillipmuller to watch the video that I just watched. That's not relevant for the discussion about the video.
Then something really basic that you could reasonably expect webpages to have figured out since the early 2000s. Shortening comments properly. I don't need a comment shortened when the part that you've cut off is only 1 line. Not even if it's 5 lines. That's just annoying. But somehow Google has managed to implement the single most naive implementation of comment shortening.
Next thing is the thread-system that they have going on. I still have not figured out how the comments inside a thread are ordered. Most of the time, they seem to be chronologically ordered, but occasionally you see people replying to other people who have commented further down in the chain. That their time stamps are only as precise as the next bigger time-frame ("2 weeks ago", "6 months ago", "1 year ago") doesn't help either.
And then their tagging system. It's a naive "+username"-text in the comment text. If the user changes their user name, then good luck trying to trace it back. Also, they allow user names with spaces in them, meaning that it's often hard to figure out what's part of the user-tag and what's part of the actual comment-text. If they had a less naive tagging system with proper identifiers behind the user names, they could highlight what the user-tag is and dynamically load in the correct user name.
censorship, ad revenue, etc
Were Youtube to build feature parity to each of those sites, they might see more communities self-contained within Youtube.
Crowdsourcing would be incompatible with DMCA safe-harbor requirements (so they wouldn't be "DMCA takedown request reviews" if they were crowdsourced.)
It's an interesting idea though, it's far too easy to issue a fraudulent DMCA takedown and there are no repercussions as far as I know.
In any case, I think YouTube kinda subverts much of the DMCA provisions by having their own claim system (the whole ContentID thing) which often comes into play and causes problems (for content creators, not for people making claims of dubious authenticity) before real DMCA claims are made.
YouTube's problem is that there is no interested to improve the product (content id). Technology is good enough, but the product itself sucks.
Full disclosure, I'm heavily biased as I built my company on their (and others) inefficiencies.
Fair use is not a definition -- it is a legal doctrine. Conclusively determining whether a video is fair use not only impossible for a computer, it is impossible for people. The only way to determine whether a video falls under fair use conclusively is to conduct a Federal trial and a series of appeals.
There are precedents that can be use to determine fair use. Not everything fals in those categories but as I mentioned before, majority already does.
As other commenters pointed out, this is infinitely more likely to stick than Google Plus. I've personally never felt that Google was serious about Google+. If they had been, they'd have gone for an approach like this one from the start. For instance, integrate it natively to Gmail (and of course make it individually accessible on its own domain) - it worked for Hangouts adoption.
Make it a new tab in Gmail, make it very fast and easy to switch between your email and your social feed. Many people already spend many hours in gmail, or have a tab always open anyway. Adoption would have been instant, and if they had done that in 2011, maybe it would have had a shot at dethroning Facebook.
It certainly seems like it, but are there any examples where a social network has been built this way?
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/10/14/microsofts...
[2] https://www.engadget.com/2007/09/13/steam-community-official...
[3] http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/15/curse-voice-hits-1-million...
Isn't that what they did with g+? forcing youtube users to use g+ with youtube and people didn't like it very much
Is this actually separate from G+? As someone who actively uses it daily, this definitely seems like each channel could very well just be a community in G+ Communities (which is alive and thriving already, though of course not to the extent that YouTube as a whole is), with comments potentially mirrored between YouTube and the G+ community (in the same way comments are mirrored between e.g. the comments on this post and G+ posts of this url).
Could definitely be a way to introduce different audience to G+ from a new vector.
Circles were quite a practical way of following topics of interest, w/o having to actually communicate with anyone or disclose anything about myself to anyone (as opposed to "friending" anyone on fb, which notifies the other party as if I actually wanted any interaction with them), and there was quite a lot of say tech folks in various topics to track.
But as a topical news aggregator, there are other options, such as hackernews, reddit, various planets and desktop/console rss/atom aggregators etc, so not a real gain.
Didn't stick to it mainly cuz I'm apparently too introverted for classic friend-to-friend social networking, as I suspected; didn't really have anything to say about anything, and didn't care much to hear about the daily fluff in the lives of acquaintances either.
So what kinds of concepts/services developed and thrived on G+ since google gave up on yt integration?
Much of the focus on circles was replaced with Collections (which are basically reverse-circles), which I think works a little better. You can still follow people as a whole, but you can also choose to follow any of their "collections", which basically split their posts up per-topic (e.g. I have collections in writing, programming, and pictures of my cats -- most people don't follow all three).
Also with more people joining G+, it moved further away from how I was using it as a news aggregate to more of an actual social network. I could probably get more news if I unfollowed people posting about their days, but most of the people I follow are experts in my fields and it's interesting to see what their days/problems/lives are like. There's still lots of really good, in-depth conversations in comments though, as long as you write a reasonable post to prompt them (most shares without accompanying text are just ignored).
Also, I've heard the Communities feature is huge, but it seems a bit too social (and lowest-denominator) for my tastes. If I were looking for an analogy around the net for the parts of G+, I'd probably say Communities feel like YouTube comments, public posts feel like the better end of reddit, and private posts (where much of the fun in the author/publishing circles I'm in happens) feel like HN.
But they don't need a massive social net just for that, and they have G+. Isn't that enough to do the job?
I have over 700 hundred youtube subscriptions and check out my feed daily. I definitely do not want my subscription feed clogged up with texts, gifs, and whatnot. I really don't care what the political beliefs of XYZ hobby channel have, I watch for their specialized content.
youtube is the powerhouse behind video. stick with that, continue making it better. there is still more to be done.
Which is why Google had to develop a native social solution; they were bleeding potential users who need a feasible way to get in touch with their fans. May be simple but it is better than a bare bulb.
For example, the previous method of YouTubers making a simple announcement was to make an announcement video, which is dumb.
I do see your point, there are some video-centric features YouTube could add but I'm skeptical that's all this will be.
Every app attempts to expand until it has a Facebook-like timeline. Apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Facebook Newsfeed was a smart move. They took the best idea of Twitter at the right time. That and introducing asymmetrical relation.
They're trying to do the same thing with Youtube. And apparently Google isn't going to wait to respond.
I don't think you can credit one single company for 'inventing' the idea of a timeline. Before Twitter there were RSS readers, before that blogs, before that newsgroups, etc. Facebook just did a very good implementation of the idea, obviously inspired by everything that preceded it. Twitter is a good example of that of course.
EDIT: I mean "sponsored content."
Not like anyone who is already doing that is going to stop, but Google is hoping that maybe there will be a shift towards doing it all in one place, particularly if video is their primary medium.
On YT, if I am listening to a DJ mix, for example, I don't need to be watching the video (or looking at a still image) for 1 & 1/2 hours, so I will make the window very small. The resizing on desktop now hides the comments and I have to size the window big again to see them. The same video on mobile has the comments under the video and the 'up next' and 'related videos' list under the comments. It's a complete and utter mish-mash of layouts.
Contrast with the "live now" streams; the comments/live chat window is _only_ visible when the window is resized for mobile. Live chat is hidden in full desktop view.
YT is a disaster, and perhaps they should focus on getting some degree of consistency and usability before adding new features and complexity.
1) Swear.
2) Say anything offensive.
3) Have fun.
4) Forget to mention how delicious and refreshing Coca-Cola is.
On the other hand, certain communities have nothing but supportive and positive comments. Much of what I watch doesn't attract a single criticism, people are just happy that the youTubers keep providing quality content.
Seriously though, I get what they're trying to make a play at - the small communities that spring up around content creators based on a certain topic. It's clearly a shot across the bow of Facebook pages which can embed videos in a feed as well as post discussion pieces, etc.
I would've personally liked to see them do it a bit more robustly. This and other platforms allow for creator - consumer interaction, but not consumer - consumer, and I think that's a differentiating strength of content creators on Youtube. Take it from being a copy of a Facebook page, to a sort of hybrid Facebook page/group with one leading creator and then interaction amongst all the consumers of that content. It could've potentially recreated the forums community feel using an existing set of communities as the kickstarter for the platform.