Earlier this week, in a move that closely mirrors the Community Notes feature of Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG GOOGL YouTube has started experimenting with a new feature.
What Happened: On Monday, Jay Baxter, a senior engineer at X spoke about the development at YouTube saying that Google’s online video-sharing platform is replicating Community Notes with remarkable precision, including the same note rating options and algorithms.
“YouTube is copying Community Notes right down to the nitty-gritty details,” he said, adding, “To be honest I thought they’d take the core idea and then rebuild it more from scratch, so it’s a big vote of confidence to see them copy many of the lower-level details too.”
Baxter went on to express hope that YouTube would follow X’s lead in open-sourcing their data and code stating, “I do believe Community Notes should be everywhere. We open-source our data and code after all, and I hope YT does too!”
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YouTube did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comments.
Why It Matters: YouTube’s notes feature will allow users to clarify aspects of a video, such as whether it’s a parody or contains older footage presented as a current event. If a note is found useful, it may appear in a small box beneath the video.
Meanwhile, Musk has time and again touted the Community Notes feature, often crediting it for making X the best source of truth. However, there’s also a potential for notes to contain errors or irrelevant information. Previously, Musk’s Community Notes erroneously noted a graphic video shared by Donald Trump Jr.
YouTube appears to be taking lessons from Community Notes’ trial and error. The platform has restricted the pilot phase to a limited group of users and evaluators. It also acknowledged that any incorrect information is “part of how we'll learn from the experiment.”
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