Building Community

YouTube recently released stats that 60+ hours of content are being uploaded to their site per minute. That sort of data is pretty impressive, but when you take a look at a lot of that content, it becomes a little less impressive. I’ve noticed an increasing amount of video responses to popular videos on YouTube that feature women with low cut shirts in the thumbnails blathering on about whatever video they’re responding to. This sort of content is not exactly enhancing the community at YouTube, so I can only assume these types of people are trying to cash in on ad revenue via traffic from the videos they’re responding to. 

Linkbait is nothing new and I’m not the only one who has noticed this, but I was recently reminded of all this because of a video from reddit the other day. This guy isn’t the most articulate speaker, but he makes his point pretty well. 

Problems like this one indicate that communities and curation have become increasingly important in the online world. At Shelby.tv, as we think about the future of what video community should look like, we are building the type of community that doesn’t promote the “spammy" user-generated-content (UGC) that we see on places like YouTube. Recommendations and organic UGC are great, but recommendations (especially as related to the long tail of UGC) powered without a social filter or strong context around them feel empty, spammy and often result in the lower quality kind of stuff I’m referring to here.  

We believe the social filter is the key to building a community of content that doesn’t promote this sort of abusive behavior and we’re really excited about sharing what we’re building with the rest of the world.  More on this soon. ;)

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