Videos can reach three different levels. The first level is ‘Chosen One’; this is decided by the staff and these videos have diplomatic immunity, so votes don’t affect them. This is comparable to the articles on Wikipedia that are fully protected from editing. Except at Funny Or Die this decision is not made by a higher level of users (‘administrators), but by company staff. The second level is called ‘Immortal’, which is “a badge of honor.” Achieved when the video has at least 100.000 views and is rated over 80% funny, earning it a immunity for other votes.
“Does this mean every Immortal video will be the funniest thing you’ve ever seen? Maybe not. But this a democracy and sometimes people vote for things that aren’t good (see: White House). So think before you vote.”
The third level is called ‘The Crypt’, which is reached when the video has at least 1.000 views and is rated under 20% funny. Once a video has reached either the first or second level of immunity, it can never be voted down to ‘The Crypt’. The other way around is also possible, videos in ‘The Crypt’ can be “resurrected” by voting them funny to get them out of ‘The Crypt’. What I personally find interesting about ‘The Crypt’ is what I already mentioned earlier about the rating of comments on YouTube and ‘disemvowelling’, the fact that the content is not removed from the website, but more sort of hidden and thus creating a collection of data that most of the users don’t want to see or read. First of, this approach both reveals the collective opinion of the community as well as silences anyone claiming to be robbed of their freedom of speech. And secondly, this avoids senseless discussions (for the “proof” is gone) about falsely flagged videos that are taken down and not mirrored. On this subject MIT started an interesting research project called YouTomb . This project by MIT Free Culture monitors a certain amount of videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation along with the metadata, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown, with a particular emphasis on those videos for which the takedown may be mistaken. Revealing a critical view towards the YouTube flagging system.
Like the companies blog already mentions, it is suppose to be a democracy. But this does not mean that the whole moderation system depends on the user community as a blogpost from May 7, 2007 reveals. In which misuse of the program is reported about someone who created a program that generated fake votes. This shows that they’ve set up other ways, besides the voting system, to keep the site clear. But similar to Digg they actively promote user participation in order for the system to work.