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YouTube Gets Its Own Social Network With Launch of YouTube Community (techcrunch.com)
The earlier reports were right when they said YouTube was working on launching its own social networking service for content creators. Instead of the "YouTube Backstage" branding, YouTube has decided to call their social networking service "YouTube Community," which allows content creators to use text, GIFs, and images to better engage viewers. Given the controversy surrounding YouTube in regard to demonetizing videos that are not deemed "friendly to advertisers," many YouTube creators have been or are thinking about leaving the site and joining competing services. These new tools are designed to help keep creators from departing to competing platforms. TechCrunch reports: YouTube has been testing the new service over the past several months with a handful of creators in order to gain feedback. It's launching the service into public beta with this group of early testers, and will make it available to a wider group of creators in the "month's ahead," it says. Access to this expanded feature set is made available to the creators and their viewers by way of a new "Community" tab on their channels. From here, creators can share things like text posts, images, GIFs and other content, which the audience can thumbs up and down, like the videos themselves, as well as comment on. Viewers will see these posts in their "Subscriptions" feed in the YouTube mobile application, and can also choose to receive push notifications on these posts from their favorite creators, YouTube says." Only time will tell whether or not this new move will be better received than YouTube's Google+ integration...
Google will try again the same thing with a different name.
Dear Screwtape,
Today I expanded YouTube comments section to social network. Tomorrow I will make it mandatory to use to access any other Google service. This is all as planned, and I will finally succeed into turning Internet into private hell that is Youtube comments section.
Sincerely yours,
Wormwood
Sorry, growing up in the 80s sort of drilled that song into my subconscious...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire YOUTUBE COMMUNITY. We know YOUTUBE COMMUNITY has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We're sad too.
There are two simple reasons for this: usage of YOUTUBE COMMUNITY has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.
Thank you again for using YOUTUBE COMMUNITY as your COMMUNITY platform.
And nothing of value was gained.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
"Given the controversy surrounding YouTube in regard to demonetizing videos that are not deemed "friendly to advertisers," many YouTube creators have been or are thinking about leaving the site and joining competing services. These new tools are designed to help keep creators from departing to competing platforms"
Huh? No they are not. This has been in development for a long time, way before the demonetization "scandal" happened.
And somehow, I don't think YouTube is too worried about creators departing to competing platforms. They did way worse before, and no one left.
What happens again and again is the drama, bunch of people complaining about it, threatening to leave, usually not fully understanding what they are talking about, then they all realize that YouTube is the only service with such a huge audience, and then they just give up.
Which I know is bad in itself, but the top statement sounds a bit like guesswork. Did you just try to bungle together two separate things there?
YouTube Community is here because quite frankly, the current commenting system is outdated, a mess and cumbersome. Not because Google+, not because YouTube commenters are the worst, but because the system itself is horrible. You can't find anything in it, browsing through it can sometimes be impossible, the webapp is often not synced with the mobile app, you can't do much of anything other than scroll and reply to people, it's probably among the most primitive commenting systems out there. Commenters can't even see a history of their own comments. There's zero customization.
But this has been an issue and a constant complain for quite a while now, so I guess YouTube is finally doing something about it... no clue if it'll be worth anything though.
ME deciding what I want to see is fine.
YOU deciding what I am allowed to see it not.
Do you finally get the difference?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.