YouTube has Launched their own Social Network: "YouTube Community"

bkkshadow (70)in #steemit • 8 years ago

Somehow i missed this, but about a week ago YouTube launched their own social network, with the completely uninspiring name of "Youtube Community".

YouTube Community

The aim of YouTube Community (I'm gonna call it YTC from now, see it's already annoying) is to enable content creators to better engage with their viewers and subscribers. It allows the use of images, GIFs, text and more. One gets the idea that YouTube realises they have a lot more competition than they did in the past, and they may have seen people heading for the door to peddle their video wares on new, more versatile and competing platforms. Although steemit is not "currently" a particularly useful video platform, who knows what the future holds.

Apparently for the past few months the people over at YouTube have quietly been testing "YTC" in the background. They did this by inviting a handful of their bigger content contributors to work with them and give them some input. The feedback phase has finished and as of September 13th 2016, the service went public with the Beta version for testing and use, however, only among a limited amount of accounts. The plan is to roll it out to the wider community over the next few months, yet no ETA has been given.

Within YouTube you can access the "YTC" through a new "Community" tab on the given channel, and from here you can do most of the things you would wish to do on any traditional social media; post text, images, GIFS, as well as Like/Dislike (thumbs up/thumbs down) and comment on videos.

The New "YouTube Community" Tab

Effectively, YTC allows the creators to run a mini-social network of sorts on their channel’s page. After the failure of Google+ this mover is important for Google to try and compete with Facebook, plus the new media platforms here and coming soon.

For me personally, I'm looking forwards not backwards, and would rather support steemit, Synereo, or DECENT. For me, the likes of YouTube, EBay, Paypal and Facebook have had it too good for too long. Time to shake things up with blockchain based platfroms.

Here you can see a short video from the vlogbrothers were they talk a little about the "Community" platform. For instance, on the vlogbrothers’ channel (John & Hank Green), they say they will be using the YTC to inform their subscribers about updates to their channels, events, and other links and things that they’ve been collecting.