YouTube is Testing a Feature That Lets Viewers Add Notes to Videos

YouTube announced that it is testing an experimental new feature that will let viewers add context to videos via a new notes feature. It’s limited to YouTube mobile in the U.S. in English for now and is invite-only.

“Starting today, we are testing an experimental feature to allow people to add notes to provide relevant, timely, and easy-to-understand context on videos,” the YouTube team writes in the announcement post. “For example, this could include notes that clarify when a song is meant to be a parody, point out when a new version of a product being reviewed is available, or let viewers know when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event.”

As I know all too well, videos are unique in the content creation space because they are nearly impossible to update. And that means that fixing mistakes is difficult to impossible, and that some videos are simply out-of-date, lacking more recent information. So I suppose this is an attempt to help keep videos somewhat up-to-date using community-driven contributions.

For its part, YouTube says that this work follows other similar context additions it made over the years via features like information panels and its disclosure requirements for videos that are altered or synthetic. It says that there will be mistakes during the test–notes that aren’t a great match for the videos to which they’re attached, incorrect information, and so on–and that it will learn from these issues so it can see whether it makes sense to expand it to a broader audience.

U.S. viewers on mobile will start to see notes appear under videos on YouTube in the coming months. You can rate these notes as “helpful,” “somewhat helpful,” or “unhelpful,” and explain why. And YouTube will use a “bridging-based algorithm” to determine which notes are published.

It seems like simple video updating capabilities would be an even better idea: It’s easy to update written content–or replace images–that are incorrect or out-of-date. But YouTube’s capabilities here are primitive to non-existent.