AfterDawn: Tech news

YouTube offers a badge to users, calls them Heroes

Written by Matti Robinson @ 23 Sep 2016 2:52 User comments (5)

YouTube offers a badge to users, calls them Heroes

There's not a lot of places that can be more vile than a YouTube comment section. And every day thousands upon thousands of illegal videos are uploaded to YouTube. All this needs to be cleaned up while maintaining YouTube as a free and open platform to voice your views.
YouTube, though, knows that there's a problem with unmoderated nature of the comment section as well as videos that do not serve a purpose that YouTube was made for, and now they've come up with a solution. Enter YouTube Heroes.

YouTube has introduced an initiative which recruits community volunteers to police the comments and content. These people which will be given the moniker YouTube Heroes will gain more power as they've flagged more videos and comments, as well as entered more captions.

There's no money to be made here but YouTube promises some perks like exclusive videochats, workshops, and even personal contacts within YouTube. These are things that not even channels with millions of subscribers have access to.



Obviously there's a million different problems with giving a badge and a gun to seemingly random YouTube users. They even get to mass flag videos like it's a good thing that less effort goes into flagging a video.

This can be noticed from the fact that the introduction video of 1,2 million views has nearly 430 000 dislikes and a mere 7 500 likes. I think it's safe to say that it's the least liked video by ratio on YouTube (yes, even more so than the Ghostbusters trailer).

Getting rid of illegal material from YouTube is obviously a good thing and this might help quite a bit with that, and let's not forget the caption which help a lot of people, but YouTube is already a tribalistic warzone with communities within the larger YouTube community, and it will inevitably mean that at least some of these so-called Heroes are going to turn into villains and use their powers against specific communities.

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5 user comments

123.9.2016 16:37

Holy bats!

Good thing most of my video is via Netflix, Prime, and The Pirate Bay =p .

228.9.2016 13:39

Monitor COMMENTS section??? WTF is that?!?!?!?

CENSORSHIP is what it is.

F that!

Screw them!

Eat a d*ck YouTube "Heroes" and YT itself!

Bite me!



How's that for starters on comments!

If i want to lay into someone that is a jackass commenting on YT......then LET ME THE F*CK DO SO!!!

34.10.2016 11:50

Lets not forget about the children aye. I do think that comments should be monitored, for the safety of our society.

44.10.2016 12:06

Certainly. But I don't trust Google to do this well at all.

56.10.2016 17:08

Originally posted by Dragon3000:
Lets not forget about the children aye. I do think that comments should be monitored, for the safety of our society.
I totally understand you on this! TOTALLY!

Sadly it's a balance that I don't think can be met. Balancing out public opinion and free speech being posted vs not allowing certain individuals to actually see those posts.......that's not an easy achievement.

Now...my wife and I don't have and don't ever want kids so I'm a bit bias to all things NOT KIDS.

In this case, it's like the radio. "Don't like what's being listened to...change the station"

Kids are gonna see the nasty stuff...it's truly part of life but we should really leave the "balancing out" part up to the parents. Though that's often the blind leading the blind too.

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