YouTube has reached a point where it is just too gigantic to police its own site content. There are millions of videos uploaded everyday, with tons of copyrighted material. In order to defend its corporate sponsorships and to make as much money as possible, YouTube has to remove as much copyright infringing content as possible. YouTube can’t spend the time and resources to flag every video with questionable content, so it uses bots that automatically check videos for “questionable” content instead.
Robots can only get you so far, so YouTube had to try and come up with a new system. In comes YouTube Heroes, a new program on the video hosting site that tries to get volunteers to do YouTube’s job for them. A video released last week detailing the program has over 500,000 dislikes and pissed off pretty much every big YouTuber on the site. Ethan at H3H3 , Boogie2988 and even Pewdiepie , have long videos discussing at length why they hate YouTube Heroes.
Why is YouTube Heroes so bad? It rewards active users who caption videos and engage in the community with special perks like events and never before seen products. On the surface it seems almost perfect, with the big super corporation looking out for it’s viewers while trying to foster a community. But when you go deeper, that’s when you really start to notice the problems.
YouTube is using volunteers to help police its site. However, YouTube Heroes may mass flag videos for other reasons, which has the potential to be really dangerous. Flagging a channel’s video can result in the video losing monetization, getting age restricted or even taken down. Say you aren’t a fan of a particular YouTuber so you decided to flag all his videos. Now if you are a big enough dick you can just flag all the videos at once. The potential for abuse is insane.
A few days after the massive controversy started, YouTube changed a few of the things said in the YouTube Heroes video. Techraptor managed to catch on to these adjustments, like changing “report negative content” to “report inappropriate videos accurately.” The wording is a lot clearer, but it still means the same thing.
I don’t think YouTube Heroes is the end of YouTube, no matter what Leafyishere says . Still, trying to get unpaid viewers to do YouTube’s dirty work for them in exchange for “perks” is just plain slimy. YouTube needs to man up on this initiative and either fix it up or get rid of it entirely.
Just don’t issue an apology like the Fine Bros and YouTube should be fine.
