Weekly Update - April 10, 2021: YouTube, Webmasters, Clubhouse

I hope you all are enjoying Spring! My excitement for the week was getting my first COVID vaccine dose. If you are eligible, and appointments are available, I urge you to do it too.

Otherwise this was a quiet week. There are a few updates for video creators, webmasters and more.

Mark your calendar

• StreamYard’s Live Stream Success Summit is April 15. Register for free to attend the keynotes, visit the expo “booths” and network with other attendees. The event is on the Hopin platform, which acquired StreamYard in January.
• Google I/O is coming soon. Try the punchcard puzzles to discover the date, or (now) just visit the Google I/O homepage. It’s virtual and free for everyone. If you register, you will get access to live Q&As, reserve live Workshops and Ask Me Anything Sessions, and chat inside “I/O Adventure”.

YouTube and Video

• YouTube is filtering potentially hurtful comments. They can be found on the Held for Review tab on the Comments page in YouTube Studio. To view them click the option to show hidden comments.
• YouTube’s quarterly transparency report has a new metric: the Violative View Rate (VVR). This is the estimated percentage of views on YouTube that comes from content that violates the Community Guidelines (excluding spam). It is currently around 0.17% (or less than 2 views per thousand), a significant drop since 2017. Their latest machine learning technology removes 75% of content that violates the rules before it has 10 views. See the latest VVR data.
• Twitch will be enforcing their Hateful Conduct and Harassment Policy against “serious offenses that pose a substantial safety risk to the Twitch community” that happen off the Twitch platform. They will be working with law enforcement and other services to investigate such incidents.
• TikTok has introduced (optional) automatic captions that let creators easily caption their content. This is currently available for content in American English and Japanese.

Webmasters

• Google Search Console has made it easier to understand how your website is doing on Google with two improvements to Performance Reports: regular expression (regex) filters and improved comparison mode that supports multiple metrics.

Social Networks

• Pinterest will require users to agree to their new Creator Code before posting Story Pins. It’s all about positivity, with the basic rules: be kind, check your facts, be aware of triggers and visually sensitive content, practice inclusion and do no harm.
• Social audio platform Clubhouse launched Payments, which lets you send money to other creators. Currently anyone can send a payment, but only a small test group can receive payments. They say they want to roll the feature out to everyone “soon”.

More

• The Feedly feed reader platform now lets you link your Reddit account and follow subreddits and searches. A neat feature is that it pulls the text of linked articles into the feed, so you don’t have to click to read it.
• Yahoo Answers is shutting down May 4th. Yahoo Answers launched in 2005, and but has become largely irrelevant in the face of Google Search, Reddit, Quora and other platforms where people can get answers to their questions. This is just the latest piece of Yahoo to be shut down or sold off since it was acquired by Verizon in 2017. Unlike Tumblr and Flickr, Answers didn’t find a new home.
• Monster Mash is a sketch-based 3D animation tool. Give it a try here.
• What hobby did you research in 2020? Container gardening? Astronomy? Ghost hunting? Online poker? Google lets you dive into pandemic hobby trends.

That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Photo: Daisies by GLady from Pixabay