YouTube has not had a good year. They’ve been criticized for how fair use law has been applied on their site; they’ve also been criticized for sending notices about being more “advertiser friendly” by avoiding edgy jokes or other content. But they recently announced a new program that sent their community into a flurry once again, with numerous videos responding by calling it the end of YouTube.

The newly announced “YouTube Heroes” program essentially allows volunteers to better moderate the community. Not a bad idea on paper, but in practice it becomes a lot more problematic. At level one of the multilevel system, you can add captions and subtitles to videos, which is again not a bad idea, but you can also flag inappropriate videos or “report negative content.” (Note: in the video from which this information is based, it has since been changed to “report inappropriate videos accurately.”) At level two, you can have videochats with other heroes. At level three, you unlock “super tools” like mass flagging videos and moderating the infamous YouTube comment section. Levels four and five have perks related to YouTube itself, like testing new products or attending the Heroes Summit, a convention-type gathering.

This system has so many problems. The biggest one boils down to this: YouTube is allowing its comment section to moderate its content. YouTube comments are notorious for spewing verbal abuse of any stripe, for any reason. You’re giving the trolls the ability to flag videos as inappropriate. Just saying it out loud makes the system laughable, but the system is ripe for abuse.

I mentioned fair use earlier. Basically, that’s the legal idea that I can use copyrighted content (music, movie clips, game footage, etc.) as long as I make substantial changes by having original content alongside the copyrighted one. Review channels are a prime example of this in action. But negative reviews have often been met with copyright claims on the videos, taking away the ability to earn ad revenue (aka, some people’s living) and making it harder to run a successful channel.

The system has been abused by people who cannot take negative criticism, as well as companies who claim videos that they have no rights to. Seriously.

Now with the Heroes program, the comment section can get that power. If the comment section was a civil place and not a wasteland of trolls and abuse, that might be ok. But like I mentioned earlier, we don’t live in that world. Trolls can take their trolling to the next level under this system.

But that isn’t the most galling part of this system. It’s the patronizing attitude toward the people that made YouTube the site it is today. Make no mistake, the job that YouTube is asking its heroes to do on a volunteer basis should be done by YouTube employees. According to Alexa.com, which tracks overall web traffic, YouTube is the second largest site on the internet by traffic, and it’s only beat out by Google, its parent company.

This is a site and company that can afford to have paid moderators and people double-checking fair use claims, and now they go around and claim that it should be on us to do this for free. And the more you prove to be YouTube’s helpful lapdog in this asinine program, the more opportunities to do paid work for free open up. You can test new products or even contact YouTube staff directly. You know, that thing that channel owners should be able to do? This is a prime case of having a cake, eating it, then demanding you make another one.

YouTube built itself on user’s videos, and now that it’s a billion-dollar entity, everyone in the media game wants to get into the action. YouTube knows they have more money than us the users, so naturally it sucks up to them instead of us.

As of this writing, the video announcing this program has over 500,000 dislikes on 1.7 million views. The comment section has been disabled for this video. I don’t know if that was because of the backlash or if it was disabled to begin with. But think about that in this context: YouTube knew the comment section was horrible, created a program empowering the comment section, then disabled the comment section so it can go on with the delusion that it was a good idea. Here’s some better ideas, YouTube: pay moderators you already have, empower your creators to better regulate their community or hire your “heroes.” But you won’t do that. I know you won’t do that because that would the sensible and correct thing to do. This year has been all about the exact opposite of that.