YouTube Heroes will help keep the website's comments clean

By: Mariella Moon for Engadget.

If you’ve ever ventured into YouTube’s comments, you know how nasty things can get. To help it purge all the bad juju the section brings, the video-sharing website is enlisting the help of volunteers called “Heroes.” It’s an expanded version of the Trusted Flaggers Program and gives users who want to help out not just the power to flag inappropriate comments and videos, but also to add captions and subtitles. Members also get a separate dashboard where they can track their contributions, see if the captions they submitted had been approved and if the content they flagged had been removed.

While YouTube will still get the last say on what to remove from the website — again, Heroes can only flag and report them — a lot of people stillaren’t happy that the Google-owned entity is putting unpaid volunteers in charge. Regardless of what users think, the Heroes program is happening, and it’s now open to people from around the globe who have a history of contributing to the community.

You can apply right here if you spend a lot of time on YouTube anyway. Just take note that the program has a gamification aspect: the more you contribute, the more features you unlock. You might have to start at the very bottom and work your way up to get access to training materials and to gain the ability to flag multiple videos at the same time.