Young, prospective content creators need a safe space to express and share their passions without fears of internet toxicity, in order to grow both personally and as a creative.
YouTube Spaces — a designated area in the YouTube ecosystem where content creators can seek, share, and grow within a community. No matter how far stretching or niche, YouTube Spaces is designed to create space for creators who are burdened by toxicity or simply wanting to meet others.
YouTube and many other immensely popular social media platforms boast a great diversity of user-generated content within its webpages. For many new creatives, these platforms offer the prospect of sharing a part of themselves to like-minded people—expressing their passions and creativity through video content and other mediums. For others, especially the younger generation, it can be overwhelming to get started—with toxicity, self-perception, and even the platforms themselves creating obstacles on their path towards self-expression and growth.
How can you cultivate a passion if getting feedback from others involves the possibility of hate speech or destructive criticism from random commenters? From listening to many of our peers’ similar experiences, we felt that this issue with many content platforms was important and could blossom into a solution that benefits more than just young, fresh content creators.
Before we decided on creating YouTube Spaces, we deferred to our research. After surveying 22 emerging content creators, we found several details that pointed us to a solution.
We found that nearly all of the content creators were young, in the age range of 18-24 years old. Along with this, our research showed that while the demographic of these creators was similar, they featured a diverse amount of content genres such as gaming, comedy, and lifestyle videos. Many of their reasons for creating stem from their passions. However, several of the content creators felt issue of internet toxicity and destructive criticisms affect their desire to create content.
Also, in terms of their proficiency with the content they create (based on a scale of 1 to 5, with a range of “no experience / still exploring” to “lots of experience”), most still consider themselves beginners.
Finally, we found that both YouTube and TikTok featured the largest amount of users based from our research. We eventually settled on YouTube to explore browser based application design.