Youtube

What is Youtube?

Youtube (www.youtube.com) is a website where you can watch videos about all sorts of things, like short, few second funny videos, live streams, edited clips of live streams, hours long movies, documentaries, parodies, gameplay videos, video tutorials teaching you how to do tons of things, cartoon episodes, recipe videos, workout videos, boxing videos, wresting videos, episodes of Bob Ross painting, music videos, anime music videos, you can even watch videos of people watching videos on Youtube on Youtube. You can also upload videos for free if you create a Google account, comment on videos, create playlists of your favorite videos, and subscribe to your favorite Youtubers through the platform. Since so many videos are actually just music in video format, you can also listen to music on Youtube if you want, and if you don't like your playlist getting interrupted by ads, you can pay to get rid of them.

Posting on Youtube

In order to post videos or comments on Youtube, and use some other features, it's necessary to have a Youtube channel. Youtube channels are what Youtube calls its user profiles. A single human user with a single Google account may have multiple channels. This works just like Tumblr blogs: you don't need an extra e-mail for each channel.

All your interactions are performed through your channel. Most users don't upload videos on Youtube, they only comment. Those commenters are still "Youtube channels," they just haven't uploaded any videos.

A Youtube channel can have its own profile picture (avatar), an unique text code for username (e.g. virtualcuriosities), a normal human-readable name (e.g. Virtual Curiosities), a description (bio), a link to its own website, and a contact e-mail.

When you upload a Youtube Video, Youtube automatically processes the video to check for copyright infringement and other issues. Recently, with the launch of Youtube Shorts, videos that are short and vertical automatically get a different layout.

Youtube uses a tiered system for its users. New users can upload videos, but they don't have access to features like uploading custom thumbnails. To get access to these features, it's necessary to confirm a phone number. Even if you do this, you still won't have access to some other features, which you only get by further confirming your identity with a video of yourself or by having an old account in good standing with the community guidelines.

Youtube videos may have tags, hashtags and categories associated with them. Videos have titles and descriptions, and notably the hashtags can go into the title of the video. This is likely result of Youtube's age. At first, it used categories, then tags, then hashtags. It's not clear if Youtube still uses categories and tags for anything in its current form. At least I can't find any way to browse the categories, and I don't see the tags, either.