As the frustration around YouTube guidelines simmers away, YouTube is attempting to turn down the heat with a couple of updates to its displaying and timestamps of Community Guidelines violations. The new editing features show you exactly where a violation has been found so that creators know what to edit out, rather than removing what they guess is causing a violation and testing their theory by posting the newly edited video to the public, all of which interferes with monetization. It also specifies just what is causing the Community Guidelines violation.
As per YouTube: “We’ll show where the policy violation occurs, what precise policy was violated, and what that means for the individual piece of content. And at the end of the guided resolution flow, we’ll show creators what options they have going forward and make it easy to take those next steps.”
YouTube has a long history of less-than-helpful guidelines irritating its creators – to say the least. The sad part is that we’re not really talking about too long ago. In only November of last year, YouTube launched an update to its Advertiser Friendly Guidelines which retroactively made every piece of content on the site that violated the terms unable to be posted with adverts. These guidelines were as broad as bad language and violence, causing a lot of problems for gamers on the platform: the biggest genre of content.