Youtube is coming up with a new concept called the “YouTube Slam“. The project pits two videos against one another in a “hot or not” style competition. The site lets you watch two videos and decide which one is better, or in the case of comedy, funnier.
That project alone wasn’t scientific or geeky enough for Google, so the company decided to delve deeper into what makes videos funnier and how the company can detect that you enjoyed it more than any other old video.
One place the company decided to go was within the comments on all of the videos that participated in the YouTube Slam. By looking at the content of the comments, it found that many people would leave a quick “hahaha” or “LOL”. Comments that display the humor you found in the video can help the company rank the popularity of a video in a slightly different way. This data on top of what it was already collecting with your votes, might just tell us which videos are actually funnier.
Google has decided to build it in to an algorithm which ranks the funniest videos.