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YouTube Is Looking for Volunteers To Improve Its Site (fortune.com)
The video-sharing site is looking for "heroes." YouTube is looking for a few good users who want to be "Heroes." Google's video-sharing site wants volunteers to help moderate its content by flagging inappropriate content, fielding questions in YouTube Help forums, and contributing video captions and subtitles, reports Reuters. From the report:Performing those types of tasks will help users earn points in the site's new crowdsourcing program, called "YouTube Heroes." YouTube announced the "Heroes" program in a post on the site's help channel on Wednesday that included a video showing prospective volunteers how they can participate and the perks they can earn. "You work hard to make YouTube better for everyone and, like all heroes, you deserve a place to call home," YouTube says in the video.
i'd rather spend my time looking at and sharing inappropriate content than flagging it for removal.
On the other hand, Digg used community moderation too. I witnessed it's sudden and spectacular decline. Community moderation was part of the cause for that. It started out as individuals upvoting comments they agreed with and downvoting or reporting comments they disliked, but then it grew organised. Bands of dedicated activists, striving to make their political view dominant. The DiggPatriots were the best known and one of the better organised groups, but not the only one - they monitored upcoming stories, identifying anything that they judged too 'liberal' before it hit the front page and burying it with coordinated down-votes, as well as scouring the comment history of liberal community members for anything they could report as a terms of service violation.
Eventually it got so bad that the community could no longer trust Digg, and declined. To put the nail in the coffin the site then underwent a redesign, in part to make it more resistant to coordinated manipulation - but after the redesign, despite the owner's promise of no paid article placement, the front page was suddenly filled with product reviews, all of them glowingly positive. The Digg traffic graph became a cliff heading down, and the site is now a shadow of what it once was.