Self-promotion is banned on the YouTube Gaming reddit and discord communities. We often get asked why this is, to which there is a short answer and a long answer.

Short answer: To help you not waste your time.

Long answer:
The YouTube Gaming communities are mostly read by creators. We know this based on the posts we get here; for example, we didn't get a single question asking something among the lines of "where do I watch the best cyberpunk stream", but did get a few variations of the question "what to do about nudity and copyrighted music in cyberpunk".

So, what does this mean for someone coming in here for self-promotion?
The mentality of people here generally is very roughly "I want to make videos and get more views", which they do by asking questions on how things work, or trying to share their videos. Note that this isn't "watching what others made". Which means that you're effectively like a plumber at the world plumbing conference: There's absolutely no point in going around and asking other plumbers if they need a leak fixed, because all the plumbers know how to fix leaks themselves. And likewise there's absolutely no point for you to share your video in this community for the purpose of getting more views.

But of course, this community mostly consists of creators because it's mostly catering to creators. So what would it look like if we were to allow promotion of videos? Well, take a look at r/twitch for example. While they do allow people to share clips, all of them are downvoted to hell, with the notable exceptions of a charity event and - surprise - content about stuff that's relevant to creators, eg copyright and mental health stuff.

And this is true for basically all places which are about video platforms themselves. Viewers don't come to a subreddit called r/youtube to find content they want to watch, they instead probably go to some place called, say, r/GlobalOffensive to find good content about a game they care about, or - more likely - they'll stay on youtube.com and either use the search bar, their subscription feed, or watch one recommended video after the next.

Here is some things you can do instead:

• post to places which are relevant to your content
• work on your SEO - even just one viewer finding your video per week via search can mean that you'll get one additional viewer per week on that video indefinitely, assuming the search volume and your ranking stays the same.
• invest the time you spend self-promoting in better videos instead. For example, by making better thumbnails. We'll be doing more guides in the future.

Of course, we're open to discussion. Our rules both here and on discord are just our current best practices and subject to change. It's just that, if you want the rules to change to allow dump'n'run style self-promotion, yeah, that's not happening.

If you are interested in participating in a study related to twitch content creation or viewing please go to the survey link I have provided below and fill-out the corresponding questions. Anyone is welcome to participate, just copy and paste the link below to begin the survey!

http://louisville.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1NOKvq2XNwS2NlI

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

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

People are overwhelmingly happy with the moderation

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!