YouTube today announced a variety of changes at the site that are designed to help you view content that’s relevant to you and avoid content that isn’t. While YouTube’s focus is on making it harder for uploaders to trick people, the changes they’ve made affect everyone. 

Here’s a rundown of the changes, from YouTube’s announcement:

• Stricter standard for mature content – While videos featuring pornographic images or sex acts are always removed from the site when they’re flagged, we’re tightening the standard for what is considered “sexually suggestive.” Videos with sexually suggestive (but not prohibited) content will be age-restricted, which means they’ll be available only to viewers who are 18 or older. To learn more about what constitutes “sexually suggestive” content, click here.
• Demotion of sexually suggestive content and profanity – Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our ‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages. The classification of these types of videos is based on a number of factors, including video content and descriptions. In testing, we’ve found that out of the thousands of videos on these pages, only several each day are automatically demoted for being too graphic or explicit. However, those videos are often the ones which end up being repeatedly flagged by the community as being inappropriate.
• Improved thumbnails – To make sure your thumbnail represents your video, your choices will now be selected algorithmically. You’ll still have three thumbnails to choose from, but they will no longer be auto-generated from the 25/50/75 points in the video index.
• More accurate video information – Our Community Guidelines have always prohibited folks from attempting to game view counts by entering misleading information in video descriptions, tags, titles, and other metadata. We remain serious about enforcing these rules. Remember, violations of these guidelines could result in removal of your video and repeated violations will lead to termination of your account.

The changes make it harder to game the system with tricks like editing your video to create sexy thumbnails.

But the changes will also pose some new challenges to all posters. It will be harder to optimize your video’s thumbnail, because you can’t control what YouTube chooses for your thumbnail options. And, if your video features content that others consider suggestive or profane, it’s more likely to be buried on the site than before. 

What do you think of the changes? Are the changes common sense – or censorship?