YouTube enlists volunteers to clean up their site

Volunteerism is great!

You know all about giving something back and feeling good about yourself. Sometimes you can learn or improve a skill. YouTube wants volunteers to help moderate its content by flagging inappropriate content, fielding questions in YouTube Help forums, and contributing video captions and subtitles.

There’s no payment involved, but performing those types of tasks will help users earn points in the site’s new crowd-sourcing program, called “YouTube Heroes.”

Your turn to be Big Brother

YouTube wants to ensure that community guidelines are followed. To that end, they have a community flagging system which allows users to report potential violations. Once a user flags a video, a review is triggered. YT’s policy enforcement team reviews flagged content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, promptly removing material that violates their policies.

To make the flagging process more efficient, YT is looking to invite a small set of users who flag content regularly to join their Trusted Flagger Program.

Membership in the program gives users access to more advanced flagging tools as well as periodic feedback, making flagging more effective and efficient. As always, the policy team at YouTube makes the final determination of whether content should be removed.

Points, not cash, but that’s neat

In lieu of being paid, they incentivize actions through the points you receive.

The points, as far as I can tell, aren’t really good for much. Not in the sense of cashing them in for a hamburger or something, but you ultimately get to be part of the YT inner circle of inappropriate content. And no one can ever take that away from you!

According to Fortune, the “Heroes” program comes as YouTube looks to build out more of a social networking experience with the recent launch of YouTube Community. That offering, which is still in public beta mode, encourages users to interact more with the site’s large community of content creators by sharing messages, images, and other content with each other.

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