YouTube introduced a Community feature last year that manifested as a tab on a select few creators’ pages, and a Tweet from Kevin Durant and the response from YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan seem to imply that the feature will be rolled out to more YouTube content creators in the near future. While there was no official confirmation, when Durant sent out a Tweet calling Mohan out and asking about the expansion, the YouTube CPO responded that he couldn’t say anything official, but it was heavily implied that the rumors were true. Further banter in the thread reinforced this notion.
Since there is no official announcement as yet, it’s unknown just how many more creators will be able to get Community tabs on their pages soon, or what they will have to do to qualify them. Likewise, since there’s been no official announcement, YouTube could also go in the opposite direction entirely and erase the feature altogether. Mohan made no moves to imply that such a thing would happen or that what Durant had heard was false, and he made his comments on an extremely public channel, which more than likely means that the feature will expand and there will be some sort of official announcement about it soon. The Community tab has been out for a while now and has been garnering great responses, which means that development time is almost certainly not what’s causing the holdup. That means that “soon” is likely to be as soon as YouTube can figure out a vetting process and implement everything on a global scale. It may honestly be as easy as flipping a virtual switch, or it could involve a few more days or weeks of coding.
For those unfamiliar with the Community feature on YouTube, it essentially puts a miniature Google+ page directly on a creator’s YouTube profile, but only they can make original posts there. They can create posts and polls just as they would on their own Google+ page, but this feature does not require a user to actually go over to Google+ to engage with creators. The way that it cannibalizes a major draw of Google+ is actually ironic; once upon a time, there was an uproar among users because creating a YouTube profile to comment or upload required the creation of a Google+ profile. While Google’s social network is not quite dying, it will be interesting to see what kind of effect a wider rollout of the YouTube community feature has on it and how Google reacts.