Staff Pick of the Week: Nerdkiller

I've had my eye on Nerdkiller for a while now and not just because the mildly agitated honking outside his window reminds me of my Manhattan home land. Nerdkiller is an often-shirtless, somewhat spastic twenty-something who seems tragically stuck between teenagerdom and adulthood. He'll whine until you just. can't. take. it. anymore. (the "I Don't Have a Job" song) and then celebrate living on his own with a one-man watermelon party where he thinks it's a good thing that he doesn't have to shower if he doesn't want to. The longwinded but occasionally brilliant "Being Grownup Can Suck" petulantly details all the things that adults do – like drink coffee made in a French press and read the New Yorker (you know, all those words). His pet Chihuahua Miguel is a stabilizing force on the sidelines, but we shall see if the pooch's zen-like aura will be shattered by the latest visitor to Nerdkiller's air-conditioned lair. Enter Miss Allosaur:






Sexier than a T.Rex,

Mia

The YouTube Team

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Greetings from the YouTube SQUAD

Hi Tubers,


We wanted to follow up on Maryrose’s recent post and talk to you all about what’s going on with our content policies and the flagging system on the site.



Our little department administers all of the community areas of the site, from rejecting porn, to responding to copyright notices, support email and much, much more! Our number one job is to keep the site safe, so that it can continue to exist. Our greatest challenge is maintaining this in an open and transparent way that helps users follow the rules and treats everyone equal.



When a video is flagged, it goes into a queue for us to review. It doesn’t matter how many times a video gets flagged, it will never be removed without us reviewing it first. If a video violates our Terms of Use, it is rejected. At this point, a warning letter is emailed to the user letting them know that the video was removed and that repeat violations will cause their account to be terminated. Lately the volume of videos to review has taken away from other things, like responding to support messages. This means that a lot of you haven’t gotten the attention you deserve.



One problem we’ve been experiencing is that sometimes these warning emails go into people’s spam buckets, other times people presume the warning was sent in error and choose to ignore it. Sometimes it’s not readily apparent which part of the Terms of Use was violated and users will look at what else is on the site to judge what is allowed. While this seems like a logical approach, the problem is that many of those videos may be prohibited but simply have not been flagged yet.



With all of this in mind, we’re working on improving the system so that we can finally get ahead of the game and serve you all better:

We have published new Community Guidelines which spell out, in plain English, just what is and is not allowed in videos and in text.

We are developing new tools to help users defend themselves from harassment, spam and other abuse.

Our team is growing every week, including some folks dedicated to support email.

We’re going to improve our communication with you. When something happens, you’ll get a notification on the site (not just in email) and we’re working on more detailed notifications. We sincerely want our warnings to be helpful so that people will learn not to make the same mistakes twice. We’re confident that better communication will make a huge difference. So expect to see improvements in this area very soon.

Once this is all in place, we hope to have tools that will allow us to review more videos in less time, allowing the rules to be enforced more evenly.

We’ve been planning and working on these things all year and we’re excited to be aggressively pursuing all of them.



The YouTube SQUAD

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Please Be Decent and Kind

We may be peaceniks from the Bay Area (Maryrose has never tasted a hamburger! Can you believe it? -- Mia), but we've seen some comments lately in response to featured videos that have really disturbed us. As human beings.



We've got thick skin, so we're not talking about the "wtf-why-is-this-featured" jabs at our (sniff, sniff) senses of humor and taste. We're talking about the hateful comments directed at users who've done nothing to hurt anyone. Comments about their sexual orientation or weight or looks or skin color; things that we all know don't count a bit toward what's really important.



We'll stop short of a full-on lecture, but we just want to ask you to please treat each other decently and kindly. It's really not too much to ask -- and will make you look a whole lot better.



Peace out,

Maryrose and Mia

The YouTube Team

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It's Like Niagara Falls Over Here

My in-box overfloweth. And I love it that way. But it's also making me feel guilty for not being able to respond to each and every one of you who sends in feature suggestions (yes, Casey from Maryland and Clive from England, I mean you!). So I wanted to reassure you that even though you may not get a personal response from me, I do really watch all your videos and consider them for the home page. Don't believe me? Here are some videos we featured thanks to your email alerts:



Free Hugs

You Tube: The Movie

Spamland #1

La grúa y la Jirafa

Crutch!

Spice Test

Mr. Pringles Press Conference

Taco Bell Dog




Some helpful hints when writing to editor@youtube.com: include the link to your video in the email and don't forget that we don’t allow content that uses copyrighted soundtracks or images. Oh, and I can also sniff out when you get your friends to spam me about a video. But that's OK. It's good to have friends.



Alright, I’ve spent enough time on this post and have to get back to…your emails. Not that I’m complaining. In fact, please keep ’em coming and thanks so much for your patience.



Always,

Mia

The YouTube Team




P.S. I'm in the market for baby names. Got any ideas? "Lonelygirl15" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...

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Thank You

I was trying to think what I should title this blog entry...'GooTube', 'YouTube is here to stay', 'Who's a moron now Mark Cuban' all came to mind, but I settled on the only thing I really can say - thank you. YouTube would not exist and be where it is today without the YouTube community. We owe everything to you guys and we will never, ever forget that.



I've been watching your videos, reading your comments and emails and I know there is a lot of concern and speculation of what may happen to YouTube because of the acquisition. I am here to say, if anything changes it will only be for the better. Being a start up, we have struggled a lot over the past year. We've had site performance problems and nasty bugs. We haven't always been able to respond to your emails or help you with your problems. There have been things we know we need to improve (like spamming and flagging) but just haven't had the time or resources to get it done as quickly as we would like. While there are still a lot of things to be hashed out over the coming months, many of the obstacles that used to stand in the way of us delivering you the best possible product have now been removed. And for all of you who have complained about our sucky search, well you can bet that will change. :)



So no, you won't have to start paying for videos and YouTube won't be replaced with Google video. We aren't going anywhere. YouTube and all the wonder that you have brought to it is here to stay.



From day one, every single thing we have done has been about building the site, building features for our users, continually making the product better. Our goal has always been users first, everything else second - and that will not change.



I honestly never expected to have this much passion for YouTube - but it is each and every one of you who has brought that out in me. You have awed me with your creativity, humbled me with willingness to share your lives, and yes, at times shocked me with your...well...nevermind. You have changed my life and opened my eyes in so many, many ways.



So once again, thank you, from all of us at YouTube.



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

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How Flagging Works

A few days ago I posted that we've been feverishly working on ways to combat both abusive flagging and spamming on the site. We've gotten tons of emails with some really great ideas of things we could implement to help in these areas, so thank you for both your patience and your suggestions.



There does, however, seem to be a fair amount of confusion about the way flagging currently works so I think some clarification is probably needed. A video gets 'flagged' by a user clicking on the 'flag as inappropriate' link located below each video. Once a video is flagged, it is sent into a queue for our customer support team to review. Videos are NEVER automatically removed simply because they've been flagged. Every single flagged video is reviewed by someone at YouTube who then determines if the video contains material that is against our terms of use. You may have noticed that sometimes you're asked to login or register to verify your age because the video you're attempting to view may contain content that is inappropriate for some users. Sometimes flagged videos that we review do abide by our terms of use, but are not quite appropriate for all YouTube users. This could be due to a number of things - profanity, violence, adult content etc. Although they still abide by our terms of use, you can think of these videos as 'R' rated.



There are thousands of videos that are flagged for review every single day, and since we're still a small company with an even smaller team of people reviewing videos we do admittedly make mistakes at times. Occasionally a video gets flagged and we accidently take it down, or mark it as inappropriate. We're doing everything we can to diminish that margin of error but we would be lying if we said it's a 100% fail proof system.



We'll be continuing to roll out improvements to our flagging and spam filtering controls over the coming weeks so please check back here for continual updates. As always, thank you for patience and your feedback.



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

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Our days are numbered

Last night was our last feature release in this office. That's right, we're moving on to bigger, less rat infested digs next week. I can't even begin to tell you what a crazy ride it's been this past year and moving out of this, our first real office, has definitely been a little emotional for me. But more sappiness and nostalgia later. Tomorrow we're having a last day in the office shin dig and we'll be sure to post some videos from that.



So, what were we doing here until the wee hours of the morning last night? Launching a few new features. First off, QuickLists. The idea for QuickLists actually came from us watching users open up multiple browser windows so they could 'load up' a bunch of videos to watch later. Well, ⌘ N no more. See those little + icons on all the video images? Clicking on it will add that video to a list that is saved for later viewing. You can access your QuickList at anytime by clicking on the link at the top of every page, or by clicking the QuickList bar under any video you watch. You can watch all the videos in your QuickList at once by clicking 'play all', and if you want to keep the list permanently you can save it as a PlayList.



We've also been working diligently to combat two issues that have been somewhat plaguing YouTube lately - abusive flaggers and spammers. We get a lot of emails about both problems, and although we're not able to respond to everyone individually, please be rest assured that we are actively working on both of these issues and developing ways to abolish this type of abuse from the site. It's one of our highest priorities right now and we promise that in the coming weeks there will be much continued improvement in these areas.



In other news, The Underground contest is now accepting submissions. We've all spent countless (and I mean countless) hours this past week watching the entries and there are some truly amazing ones. Submissions are open until 10/18, so if you're a musician get your butt in gear and go make a video!



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

More about → Our days are numbered