YouTube is testing a new Notes feature that allows users to add more contextual details to videos hosted on its platform. The feature is quite similar to Community Notes on the micro-blogging platform X, where users can add context to any post, confirming whether it’s clickbait, fake, or engagement farming. On its official blog, YouTube has announced that a limited number of eligible contributors will be able to write notes on videos currently.
YouTube Notes Will Let Audience Add Context to Videos
According to the blog post, YouTube is testing a way for viewers to add community-sourced context to videos on the platform. The experimental feature, called YouTube notes, will allow viewers to add information, such as whether the video is a parody or old content presented as a current event.
As you can see in the screenshot above shared on the official blog, viewers will see notes pop up in a small box below the video. While only a handful of eligible contributors can add notes initially, third-party evaluators will rate the helpfulness of notes. YouTube will then use these ratings further to train the Notes systems over the coming weeks.
As for eligible contributors, anyone with an active YouTube channel and good standing with YouTube Community Guidelines qualifies.
YouTube will ask people to rate notes as “helpful,” “somewhat helpful,” or “unhelpful” and why. The platform will then use a bridging-based algorithm to consider these ratings and decide which notes are published. For the uninitiated, a bridging-based algorithm is useful for identifying notes helpful to a broad audience across various perspectives.
According to YouTube, the new Notes feature will make context more relevant, dynamic, and curated to videos you watch across the entire platform library. While the new feature is restricted to a handful of contributors and evaluators, we can expect it to roll out widely in the coming weeks.
