YouTube has rolled out new features for creators to engage better with the community. Creators can now hand pick great comments to pin to the top of the comments section. This serves the dual purpose of showing fans what kinds of comments creators appreciate, or highlight important aspects about the video. Any comment can be loved with a heart icon, which shows the creators appreciation for the comment without changing the order of appearance. Creators will have a special colour for easy identification, with a verified tick for verified creators.
A new beta feature automatically holds inappropriate comments in a moderation queue. This is an opt-in service. The identification of inappropriate comments gets better as and when creators make the choice to allow or remove a particular comment. The new features are in addition to existing community moderation features for creators. This includes the option to select moderators for the community itself and blacklist particular words and phrases.
YouTube recently made an attempt to moderate the YouTube community by launching Heroes, a program that gave YouTube users tiers of powers for increased moderation of community content on YouTube. The move was not received well by the YouYube community, with the announcement video gathering over 900,000 dislikes. The new set of tools giving the creators of channels more control of the conversation seems like a better attempt at community moderation.