YouTube is testing an X-like ‘Community Notes‘ feature in a bid to provide users with additional information on the video they’re watching. YouTube users can expect to see the new ‘Viewers added a note‘ feature in the coming weeks and months, but only on mobile devices in the United States, and only in English to begin with.
Similar to X’s Community Notes, YouTube’s feature is designed to make it possible for users to provide context to other users. Examples given include pointing out when a song is a parody, when a new product version is available, and when footage is portrayed as current when it is actually older footage of an event.
“People come to YouTube to share and learn about the world around them. With this feature, we’re excited to explore new ways to make context even more relevant, dynamic, and unique to the videos you’re watching, at scale across the huge variety of content on YouTube,” YouTube said in a press release.
As the feature is only in testing right now, YouTube is currently limiting the number of people that can add notes. Specifically, only “a limited number of eligible contributors” are being invited to add notes, with the helpfulness of each note then rated by third-party evaluators.
Providing the feature makes it out of the testing stage, it is expected that the ability to add notes will be expanded to include more users. Likewise, YouTube expects to eventually transfer the responsibility of rating a note’s usefulness to users as well, with a bridging-based algorithm (ranking algorithm) used to process all the user feedback and determine which note is ultimately displayed under a video.
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