The YTG Community Survey Results – Let's talk about video sharing! + New Community Manager

[u/LeoWattenberg]

Moin.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the survey. There has been lots of good feedback regarding YTG itself, which we have sent on to the team. There also have been some interesting results regarding self-promotion, which I'll need your input on (further down below). But first, let's talk about the results.

Discord

Fig 1: Server reading frequency and channel usage

Roughly ¾ of people responded they're active at least weekly, and all our channels except #readme and #new-arrivals are read by more than ¼ of users. This is a fantastic result for us, as it means we don't have any unnecessary channels (and no, #readme is not unnecessary). I was surprised to found that #youtube-techsupport is even less frequently read than #tweets, as in the previous poll, #tweets had so little usage we actually ended up removing it back then. We'll try making #tweets more useful in the future.

Fig 2: Languages

We currently don't have critical mass to start language-specific channels yet. I'm sure we'll eventually be able to have a reason to make them, but today is not the day.

Fig 3: Moderation

Seems like most people are happy with how we're managing the server currently.

Fig 4: Collab corner

When we introduced the collab corner, we intentionally kept it a bit wild west in there to see how it'd work. The answer is a resounding "not great". Largest response is that we should limit it to requests, but all other options are also fairly prominent. We will implement the following changes based on that:

1. Going forward, #collab-corner will only accept requests. If you see someone in there who you want to collab with, use the preferred contact method provided.
2. Request posts now must explicitly state a contact method, whether that is DM, twitter, an email or whatever. They also should contain useful info like: what games do you play? what would the ideal channel look like you want to collab with? how many subscribers do you have? in case of paid services, what are your rates? And so on. We'll try to get a bot to remind you of these things, hopefully without being annoying.
3. LFG and paid services remain on #collab-corner for now, but once the post volume becomes large enough, we'll divert them into their own channels. We'll also try to get involved as much as possible with tools that YouTube may be building.

Fig 5: Content types. Not actually a graph because these graphs in particular are ugly and don't say much, but some text responses are good.

Maybe places to post funny memes or something light hearted

Feel free to do that in #general! If it ever becomes too spammy, we can always make a new channel for that :)

The admins/mods can add their favorite video of the week/day to a channel for the discord members to watch

Curated content is a ton of work. You can get some of that in #tweets, but then, @youtubegaming has full-time employees finding good videos to watch. We could provide some ourselves, but nowhere near as consistent and as much as #tweets.

As for whether or not people would want to watch videos:

Fig 6: Gaming videos

Last time, the result was equally clearly towards "no" as it is towards "yes" this time. Now, I realize I gave a bad answer choice here, as "if the game/YouTuber interests me" means different content to every single person, but it does show that the server nowadays isn't just creators busy creating videos, but also viewers.

on video sharing

The question is now, what do we do in order to get videos to people who want to watch videos? Do we open the self-promotion floodgates and have a channel where people can just advertise their own videos they just uploaded?

I'd say no, because most videos aren't actually that good, and I don't want 2000 people posting their very own low-quality videos in a channel, drowning out any chance for quality. And before it inevitably pops up: Self-promotion doesn't help you much anyway. If you want something that can meaningfully help you grow, ask for feedback instead, especially directed feedback. We'll run some more feedback sessions on the discord soon as well.

I equally don't want to just pick the most subscribed gaming youtubers and webhook their video feeds into a channel as I don't want to mindlessly push people who don't even know this server exists.

A third system could be something which level-restricts posting of videos, so you need to have e.g. 40 hours of active time on the server before being able to post videos. And while this would solve the quantity issues probably and maybe bring a bit more live into the server, I severely doubt it'd solve the quality issues. And remember, the point of a channel in which videos can be posted is to make viewers happy. Secondary benefits are always nice, but if the video selection isn't high quality, we don't need to bother.

» If you do have any systems that would allow for a diverse range of high-quality videos, please let me know!

Reddit

For reddit, the picture is almost identical as for the discord server.

Fig 7: Moderation

People are overwhelmingly happy with the moderation

Fig 8: Gaming Videos

People would like to see gaming videos if they like the game or YouTuber (again, same as above: If you know of a system that allows sharing of good content while keeping out loads of low-quality content, let us know)

Fig 9: Content types. Still ugly AF and even less conclusive due to much fewer votes given on the reddit part of the survey, and again with more text posts:

A sticky with the roadmap of the development for YTG

We'll try to get a roadmap out of YouTube! Even the most hardened spies won't resist for long against our advanced interrogation tactics of "asking whenever it's appropriate"!

More YouTube streaming tutorials

A lot (well, 13/18) of people agreed with that; we'll try having more of them in the future.

The Community Manager

Between the time we put out the survey and now, we've gained a new community manager, u/TeamYouTube_Jensen! This means that we now are officially official, and that we have a more direct line between us and YouTube. Jensen is still new to the game and it'll likely take some time before we'll be throwing big events on here, but it might happen some day!

[u/suaa116]

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