YouTube wants to enlist you to help moderate its website

With the release of YouTube’s brand new “community” section on some channels, the company has also announced a new program that hopes to have viewers help moderate comments and videos on the platform. This program is called YouTube Heroes and in exchange for your help, you will be granted additional moderation tools and the ability to test new features within YouTube before they rollout to the public.

For the last couple of years, YouTube has had a bad reputation as far as its comment section was concerned. With over a billion accounts on the video-sharing platform, it’s not hard to imagine some of the comments that are left on videos. Before now, channel owners were responsible for policing most of the comments on their videos with YouTube only stepping in when necessary.

YouTube’s Hero’s program is here to help with that.

Announced on the YouTube Help channel, the Heroes program will award users points for different tasks that they complete. For example, you will receive one point for accurately reporting a video that doesn’t follow YouTube’s community guidelines or even receive 10 points for being the best answer in the YouTube Help forums.

With these points, you will then be able to unlock different levels in the program and receive rewards. You start off in level one where you will be able to see the Heroes dashboard and start earning more points. By the time you reach the highest level, level five, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to review products early and apply for something that YouTube is calling the Heroes Summit.

You can sign up to become a YouTube Hero here and start saving the world — or at least the comment section —  one report at a time.

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