All right, everyone calm down. "YouTube Heroes" isn't the worst idea ever.
It's just a middle-of-the-road idea with good intentions that fails to read the optics of the situation and
inadvertently insults most of the content creators on YouTube.
[Intro music plays]
Before we can start, let's make sure that everyone is up to speed on what exactly 'YouTube Heroes' is.
Late in the evening on September 20th,
YouTube unveiled a new program that would be starting up in the vague near future called 'YouTube Heroes'.
The program would reward participants with points for activities such as correctly reporting community standards violating content, adding subtitles,
captions, and descriptions to videos and participating in the "YouTube Heroes" section of the YouTube Creators Community.
Which I think I need to explain because I'm pretty sure you've never heard of it before.
So, YouTube has its own forum called "YouTube creators community" found at the horrifying URL
[www.youtube-creatorcommunity.com]
It is so poorly faced that it doesn't even show up in the first page of Google searches for "YouTube Creator Community",
and Google owns it! In fact, to get there organically you have to go to [youtube.com/yt/creators],
and then it's not at the top navigation bar, nor is it in the footer. You need to follow a link in the body
of the page to the 'Creator Community',
where you are immediately served with an error message saying "Node not found". I am not joking. This is not a joke!
Well, it is a joke, but not "that" kind of joke.
Whatever. Okay.
So, YouTube heroes community is intended to be a subsection of the impossible to reach YouTube Creators Community site...
and it's just a forum. That's literally all it is.
It functions almost exactly like 'Discourse' or a text only 'subReddit' or 'Yahoo! answers'
People post stuff, and there's upvotes.
So by participating in these three key areas,
flagging content like pornography or animal abuse,
submitting subtitles and captions, and posting on the heroes forum,
you will earn points, and earning points in turn confers privileges.
It's an RPG leveling system.
Transparently, the whole thing is an attempt at gamifying the more monotonous aspects of YouTube,
so we're just going to describe it like a video game.
I mean they called it "Youtube Heroes", for God's sake!
At the lowest level Heroes have scrub class features like access to the dashboard and forums.
At level 2, which only requires
10 Xp heroes unlock workshops and live hangouts so basically a knowledge base like whatever
This is barely a reward. At level 3 is when things catch people's attention
Access to so called super tools like the ability to mass flag content for standard violations and the ability to Moderate community content
That right there is what's got a lot of people up in arms, but it's not site-wide comment moderation power.
It's only moderation power on the YouTube heroes community; that bad, hard-to-find, forgotten forum that I mentioned earlier.
Also the Mass Flagging tool still requires that a human at YouTube confirms the content for Community violations,
just the same as if you reported them one by one right now.
We'll discuss the implications of all of these in a bit.
So moving on. Level 4 at 400 XP unlocks sneak previews of upcoming YouTube features and the
contentious vague promise of a direct line to actual flesh-and-blood humans working at YouTube. Put a pin in that one too.
Level 5 at a whopping thousand XP gives. You access to product beta tests, essentially allowing you to do even more
unpaid work for YouTube, and the ability to apply for the hero summit which is a
party, probably in Anaheim almost certainly in California.
And you're likely responsible for getting yourself there and back again and probably finding a place to stay too.
So, onto the contentious parts. First the super tools. These are the kind of things that sound good
But don't really do anything meaningful.
It's a tiny amount of sequestered power - the mod powers on the forums could be abused,
but it's a forum no one really cares about anyway.
So the worst case scenario is some weird niche internet drama where a power-hungry mod goes on a deleting spree before being stripped and banned
an hour later. I mean, it's still a bad idea
but it's not a monumentally awful idea.
The mass flagging tool is ripe for abuse but it's not an abuse that creators are likely to see in ways that they don't already.
Obsessive stalkers will already chain report all of your videos.
This is technically making harassment slightly easier,
but it's already so easy to harass people on YouTube that it's not worth the effort to get to level 3 just to save yourself the clicks.
You could spend time submitting subtitles just to level up
or you could spend that time filing false reports and making burner accounts to file more false reports
Still though this one does give me the biggest pause because even disregarding the mass flagging tool
it is actively incentivizing flagging videos for content violations.
And the higher the volume of videos reported the more false positives.
By incentivizing the system
there's a good chance that they're going to draw the attention of bad actors in greater numbers
So while it doesn't make it any easier to be awful on YouTube
(because it's already super easy to be awful on YouTube)
there is a chance that it will make awfulness a bit more common.
And finally the direct line to human beings at YouTube.
The simple reality is that this is going to be a dead end.
I fully expect that anyone who manages to reach this level is going to find that line
woefully understaffed and responses to be functionally indistinguishable from
automated responses
Still the fact that they are offering that type of support and access to the volunteers entering subtitles has rightly pissed off many content creators
Many of whom have decade-old channels in good standing, hundreds of thousands of subscribers,
but still have trouble ever contacting a real person over serious issues like fraudulent and malicious takedown orders
And this is why I say the biggest issue of YouTube heroes is a failure to read the optics of the situation
The goal of YouTube heroes is to get more people consistently taking care of boring grunt work like entering captions and subtitles
That one thing right there is at the core of it.
Go back and look at the XP rewards for each activity
one point for correctly flagged video
Meaning that you flagged it and a youtube employee confirmed it was in fact porn or animal abuse.
10 points for being the best answer poster on a forum thread
or one point per line of accepted captioning or subtitling.
For a reference point, my No Man's Sky review has over a hundred and thirty lines of captions
Reporting things like snuff films and pornography and nudity that's not properly age gated:
that's also grunt work crap that they just need more people doing
But at the end of the day, it's all about those captions and subtitles
That's where all of the XP is
which you may notice is a very boring and unsexy job.
See captions and subtitles should be the responsibility of content creators.
In broadcast it is the responsibility of the producers to deliver appropriate closed captioning and regionalised versions of their content
whether that be dubbed or subtitled,
but YouTube doesn't have the leverage to demand that people do that
They're not Netflix or Hulu
so it falls to a volunteer basis.
And this is one of the holes of capitalism
Accessibility options are rarely directly profitable enough for producers to invest in without being compelled by an outside force
YouTube already isn't profitable at all for all but a tiny sliver of users
I'm not talking about the 1%.
I'm talking about the point zero zero zero one percent
Compounding this, accessibility is only valuable at saturation.
If 1 percent of popular English videos have Spanish subtitles
It's not going to draw in more Spanish users
But if someone can click on any given front page video and have pretty reasonable odds that there will be Spanish subtitles
that changes the value.
Same thing with closed captioning for the hearing impaired
It's such a monumental task that it's not financially feasible to hire people to do it.
Years worth of videos are uploaded every day
They would never be able to catch up even if they only stuck to the few thousand most popular videos on any given day
So it's a thing that has very low market value
But a huge value to the people who make use of it, people who don't speak the dominant language, or who are hearing impaired.
Incentivizing volunteer captioners isn't the worst idea in the world
YouTube does technically stand to benefit monetarily from the effort
But at the end of the day, not that much
So the reality that we live in is that either a volunteer force donates their time to improving accessibility,
Or it never gets done
So youTube did something sensible, they took a boring job and they dressed it up in a fancy suit and added prizes
Where they failed was specifically in considering how the framing of those prizes would be perceived by the content creators who have long been
frustrated by the lack of diverse and meaningful moderation tools at their disposal
That super tool, the one that grants you moderation powers?
Remember that no one knows YouTube Creator Community is even a thing
so watching this
Is it any wonder that people just assumed they were going to hand out site-wide comment
moderation power to randos?
How does that look?
I as a channel owner still can't deputize comment moderators like I can on Twitch, Discourse, Wordpress, Reddit, or Discuss
without giving them full access to the entire YouTube account.
And you're just going to hand out powers to people who get enough points playing your minigame?
Well, it's no surprise that people interpreted it that way and immediately got pissed off.
Having said that though,
while it is totally understandable, and I do not in any way want to down play
the very real complaints that content creators have about the poor resources available to them,
at the end of the day this Youtube heroes program is an okay idea.
It jus- it needs a bit of tweaking and some much much much better communication about what exactly they're giving people power to do.
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