YouTube as a birthplace for online communities

Although YouTube is a huge video-sharing site, and its magnitude may not always reveal it, it does have a social core among its users. The research I did focused on two type of users, as it is from these groups of YouTube users that communities emerge:

1. YouTubers which are users “who spend time on the site contributing content, referring to, building on and critiquing each other’s videos, as well as collaborating (and arguing) with one another” (Burgess & Green, 2008)
2. Their subscribers.

Research has shown that content creators and viewers cluster as socially connected groups around specific kinds of content. Moreover, YouTube users have shown they have a vested interest in how the platform evolves, as they have found it to be a good place for building communities of practice and interest.

Other scholars have found that YouTube users are interested in sharing their video practice as part of “networks of conversation,” and that, to do that, they are strategic about their use of the site’s features and their knowledge of YouTube’s “attention economy.”

Audiences vs. Communities

When YouTube’s specific features are not enough for users to carry on conversations, users develop analogue solutions to the perceived technological limitations (Burgess & Green, 2008), or proceed to using additional social networking sites that allow for extra interaction.

The parallel use of these platforms allows users (both YouTubers and viewers) to actively interact with one another, which increases the amount of information and knowledge sharing among them. The use of these platforms improves the sociability of the communities, as it improves the way members interact with one another through supporting technology (Preece, 2001). This also allows for social ties to form, which is the step needed for audiences to become communities.

Clay Shirky, an expert in crowdsourcing and online collaborative community efforts, explains that “an audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack” (Shirky, 2008). The way he sees it, every website is a latent community, as it “collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too.” However, for such latent communities to become actual communities, users have to take the extra step of socializing with each other and develop common practices.

Once YouTubers and their viewers are actively interacting with one another, sharing their practices and knowledge, and developing relationships, they are building online communities.