A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, “algorithms” and AI.
What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author’s views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.
Considering that my biggest issue with YouTube is the fact that subscribing to a channel means fucking nothing now, it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Being subscribed to a channel used to actually inform you when that channel uploaded something new, every time without fail. Now, that system is a separate thing (the bell) and it doesn’t even fucking work 100% of the time. I subscribe to and have notifications enabled for about 13 channels that upload every single day; I only get notified like once a month about a random video whenever YouTube decides it wants to actually do the thing I have told it to do.
Like, I am subscribed to Technology Connections and have notifications enabled but this post is how I have come to know this video was uploaded.
Do you have it set to “All”, or to “Personalized”?
I don’t really care about most notifications, so I leave them on “Personalized”, which lets the algorithm decide when to send one. The few channels I’ve set to “All”, seem to notify me every time.
I have them all set to all.
Apparently my way of consuming YT is very different from most people. I do rely on subscriptions feed, but I have never used notifications. The feed still works perfectly - for me at least.
Just out of curiosity. Why do you need notifications? Do you try to watch the videos as soon they are posted?
I just want to know that something new I subscribe to was added because it doesn’t always appear on my front page or recommendations, doesn’t show a thing on the subscription panel (assuming the channel is one of the ones visible without going into the whole page of subscriptions) and I don’t want to have to check every channel I subscribe to every time I am watching YT just to know whether or not there is anything new.
Youtube notifications drives me mad. I will see the video I was when I get around to loading next, I don’t need to be told the nano second they upload
i have never understood this complaining about subscriptions, it has always worked absolutely fine for me
i subscribe to a channel and their videos show up on the subscriptions page, that’s it, it works?
There’s absolutely no incentive to log in to YouTube now that subscriptions and bells do nothing to control your feed. End stage enshittification.
I use Newpipe since I’m not going to login. No ads
This has not been my experience. I subscribe with bell for almost every channel I follow. If anything I almost get too many notifications, but at least I get to decide whether each notification/video is worth watching or dismissing. The new video notifications aren’t always immediate, but I almost never see a video on my subscription feed that I haven’t already been notified about.