Redefining The Social Community
Since the inception of social networks, the way digital content has been consumed has transformed to decrease the number of barriers preventing users from clicking next. Unfortunately, one part of all social platforms that has not gotten the necessary TLC is the comments section.
Note: This was a project proposal assignment used in an Effective Communication course for the Santa Clara University’s MBA program.
The "archaic" comments section
YouTube is among the largest social platforms available on the internet, “available in 91 countries and 80 languages” (YouTube for Press). One of the main driving factors of YouTube’s success is its symbiotic relationship with its content creators. More specifically, one of its most successful features is its AdSense Program. With this program, Youtube has accounted for “11% of Google’s net U.S. ad revenues” (Dutta, A.). With the digital community growing stronger and stronger each year, Youtube has been releasing features aided to bring more money and engagement support for the creator’s community.
From Memberships, links to creators’ merchandise, and to super chats during live streams, you can see the platform has put time and resources into creating more engagement opportunities between a creator and their community. Unfortunately, there is one part of the platform that seems to have slipped through the cracks of technological advances and evolution: the comments section.
Though comments are not seen as the main content of a social platform, they are a tool that creators and influencers utilize to connect to their community and for the community to connect with each other. Unfortunately, the fact that comments can be seen as repetitive and boring to read through, it is just the tip of the iceberg. There are much more serious problems occurring within the comments section that YouTube and other mega social platforms like Twitter and Facebook have yet to find an appropriate solution for in moderating. Problems such as controlling hate speech, child predators, cyber-bullying and trolling.
These are not just theoretical problems. These are problems that have been covered by national news because of how severe the problem is. One example is that CBS had to disable commenting on one of their live streams covering the congressional hearing on hate crimes because hate speech could not be prevented (Silverstein, J). Another is that YouTube made the temporary decision to disable all commenting on family vlog channels to prevent child predators from posting inappropriate comments on their children (Binder, M).
How to "redesign" the conversation
Redesigning the Social Community
The key to redesigning the conversations within our social community is by introducing automation. By automating moderation, the grouping of repetitve topics, and customized quick responses, we are creating a funneling tool to not only remove the toxicity, inappropriate behavior, and targeted hate, but also to create more engagement by increasing visibility to different converstations on a single topic and providing automated quick responses for community members to utilize.
Automated Moderation
Automating moderation is of most critical importance. Unfortunately, when YouTube, one of the major social platforms available globally, relies on their user base to moderate each other (Kastrenakes, J), it is a sign that there is room for improvement to create a system that does the brunt of the work moderating through the thousands of comments while having the user base decide the level of moderation needed.
The team will create an automated system that removes, hides, or reports to the influencer and platform that might be harmful, hateful, or harassing based off of the platform and influencer moderation preferences. Not only will this system clear the toxicity, inappropriate behavior, and targeted hate, but it will also need to continuously learn new sayings the community creates and attributes to harmful or inappropriate meanings.
UX Redesign including Automation
The second part of the redesign is focused on creating a more usable experience for community members. By using automation to group repetitive topics and responses within a specific thread, members will spend less time scrolling and more time engaging with others in their community. Additionally, by automating quick response phrases curated from the frequently submitted responses within the thread, members will again, spend less time typing and more time consuming and interacting with the others in their community.
By introducing automation into the user experience redesign, user engagement and retention will increase on a platform, which correlates to increased financial success (Marketing Charts) for the platform, but also for the content creators and influencers. The comments section of any platform is a tool that creators utilize to create connections with their community. Let’s make it better.