YouTube reveals Twitter-like community notes feature
Unsplash: souvik banerjeeYouTuber has revealed a new way to add context to videos on its platform, and it looks a lot like Twitter/X’s Community Notes.
Elon Musk’s Twitter/X introduced a feature called Community Notes in March 2021, where users can add additional context to viral tweets, with many notes being used to alert others about false information.
One person can write the note, while others vote it as helpful of not helpful, which determines whether or not it gets displayed underneath the post.
On June 17, 2024, YouTube announced an experimental feature similar to Community Notes where users can add context to videos — even if it’s not their own video.
“Starting today, we are testing an experimental feature to allow people to add notes to provide relevant, timely, and easy-to-understand context on videos,” they said in the blog post.
“For example, this could include notes that clarify when a song is meant to be a parody, point out when a new version of a product being reviewed is available, or let viewers know when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event.”
YouTube’s overall setup for notes is almost the same as Twitter’s Community Notes. One person writes down the initial context, and others vote between helpful, somewhat helpful, or unhelpful. Posts that are voted as helpful will be displayed under the video.
The company made it clear that they anticipate there will be mistakes in notes, but said that such mistakes are how they’ll learn from the experiment during its initial roll out.
Notes will only be rolled out to a handful of users at first, and those selected will either get an email or notification in their creator studio. To be selected, channels must be more than six months old with no community guidelines violations in the past 12 months.
On top of that, the account cannot have “multiple owners” or be a child’s account supervised by their parents through YouTube’s in-app options.
YouTubeUsers quickly took to social media to share their thoughts on the new feature, and many are not excited about it.
“Lmfao this can’t be good.” one user replied.
Another said: “Isn’t there already a comment section for this?”
“What’s the point, just read the comments below a video. They should instead be adding dislikes back and other removed features,” commented a third.
This is just YouTube’s latest update to the video platform. They began rolling out an old-school style layout back in April, and rolled out a new way to deliver ads in June that may break existing ad-blockers.