YouTube has long been criticised for being at the bottom of the barrel from the perspective of comments and community interaction. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some great communities built in YouTube but there are an overtone of low-quality, trollish or outright inappropriate comments to be found. To address this YouTube has today announced YouTube Heroes.
Heroes seem to have taken a leaf from the Google Maps Local Guide program and hopes to recruit an army of community crowdsourced moderators fro the platform. Do you have what it takes to be a Hero? YouTube Heroes flag inappropriate content, add captions and subtitles to videos and share your knowledge with other users on the YouTube Help forums.
To be eligible to join you must:
- have a valid YouTube channel (your YouTube channel must not be pending, suspended or inactive at the time of enrollment);
- be at least of the legal age in your jurisdiction to enter into the terms, conditions, obligations, affirmations, representations, and warranties set forth in these Rules, and to abide by and comply with these Rules
If that’s you then you can sign up here.
What’s in it for you, you ask? How about giving back to the community or the platform you love? No, not enough? How about becoming a level 5 Hero? What do you get for each level? check it out below.
Hero levels
Level 1
0 – 9 points
- Join the community
- Access the Heroes dashboard
Level 2
10-99 points
- Learn at exclusive workshops
- Take part in Hero hangouts
Level 3
100-399 points
- Mass flag abusive content
- Help moderate content in the YouTube Heroes community
Level 4
400-999 points
- Sneak preview product launches
- Contact YouTube staff directly
Level 5
1,000+ points
- Test products before release
- Apply for the Heroes Summit
That’s all great, you’re in, you want to be a hero but how do you earn those 1000+ points?
Each type of contribution is worth a certain number points.
- Accurate reports of videos that violate community guidelines = 1 point
- Contributing a sentence that gets published as a subtitle = 1 point
- Answering a user question on the YouTube Help forum with a comment selected as the ‘Best Answer’ = 10 points
The only glaring omission from that list is a point for marking a comment as inappropriate, could it be Google knows the volume or gaming of that, would be so high it has been removed?
In contrast to the Google Maps Local Guides program, it is interesting that there is no offer of either a tangible annual gift or things like Google Drive storage. Perhaps the cost of this was higher than Google anticipated for the Local Guides program?
If you think you’ve got what it takes to be a YouTube Hero, and you an avid user of the platform jump on in and apply, you could be climbing the ranks before you know it.
Let us know if you get accepted!
