@ About, The layout / Ease of use @

YouTube has to be one of my favourite websites of all - You can watch almost anything and it's like amateur television, watching programmes that networks and TV companies wont broadcast. The website has a very easy to use layout and is updated constantly. You can also interact with others in multiple ways, although sometimes these are not effective. For example, when you post a comment on a video it can fly down the page because of the many other comments pilling in on top of it, and the fact that users can disable or block your comments means your opinion cannot be heard. The other thing that I don't like is that users have control over who rates their videos, the like and dislike bar can become useless if users stop you from voting on a video so spam and bad videos will appear and not be rated down for it.

YouTube is easy to use when it comes to watching and uploading videos though, because you can upload almost any video file and do so in a very convenient way - Just press upload from within your profile and get video from any device such as a computer, phone etc and it will just upload. YouTube have a very strict policy on copyright and do everything they can to stop copyright breaches, so you are not allowed to upload any copyrighted material, or your account will be banned.

@ Online community & videos @

Videos on YouTube have various categories but I think they need to be more specific with them - I find it very difficult to distinguish what comedy videos there are because every comedy video is under the same category, rather than what id prefer "Comedy - Stand up" or "Comedy - Animals" so for disorganisation alone ill have to knock off a star. Advertisements are a big problem that lots of people complain about on YouTube but then again, it's a free service and fair enough they need to make money - I think the fact that they allow you to skip ads after so many seconds is helpful though and a very good feature that I applaud.

The community is based on users profiles, and accounts. You can post on other peoples channels and send them private messages, which arrive almost instantly. The problem I have is the amount of abuse, because every video I go to there is bad language all over the place, not very nice things being said in the comments box and people generally making arguments and hatred for fun or the sake of it. YouTube does not seem to pick up on the bad language because it seems out of control; millions of bad language and hatred comments get posted every day and YouTube cant keep on top of it. It's a shame because it ruins the community side of the website.

@ Overall @

YouTube is still a fantastic video sharing site and I love the features, and quantity of free to view videos. Its all the stuff you wont see on TV.