On Wednesday, ‘Made on YouTube 2024′, the company unveiled the YouTube Communities feature.
The new feature creates a safe space for viewers and fans, enabling them to interact directly within the creator’s channel rather than turning to other platforms like Reddit and Discord. Previously, fans could only view and comment on creators’ videos.
YouTube Communities Will Allow To Build Deeper Connections: Here’s How
Bangaly Kaba, YouTube’s director of project management, said, ‘There’s something so gratifying about finding a group of people who understand you, and Communities are a place where creators and fans can build intimate connections together.’
The forum-like setting will have a comment section on each post, similar to Facebook, Instagram, and other social media networks. Here, fans can interact and discuss their interests with other people in the creator’s community.
Currently, the feature is available only to subscribers. It is like a group chat environment, but the creator will have complete moderation rights to protect their mental sanity. They can set guidelines to reduce trolling and crass behavior and language.
Also, the feature should not be confused with YouTube Community, which was launched in 2016 for creators to share texts and images with viewers. YouTube Community does not support viewer-to-viewer interaction.
YouTube plans to release the feature and make it accessible to creator channels by 2025. Currently, it is testing the communities feature on mobile devices with a handful of creators. For example, the cooking channel Bake With Shivesh is testing teh feature on its channel by asking the viewers to post photos of dishes, allowing interaction based on the videos, and discussing recipe success and failure.
Conclusion
With this move, YouTube is making clear that it’s more than just a place to watch videos—it’s becoming a hub for interaction, helping creators and fans build stronger, more connected communities. YouTube is also testing out many AI tools for its short-format videos on Shorts to make the content creation process easy.
