I knew YouTube had one of those weird recommendation systems, but not that they were messing the subscription feed with that notification-whatever they have now. That's REALLY stupid. I looked around and apparently you can use RSS feeds to get the full content, by downloading an OPML file and throwing it into a reader. Not really pratical, though. Still, as a creator, this system is just a hurdle to you. Couldn't make it optional, even if not by default, to just show everything?
A lot of sites make this stuff optional. Both Twitter and now Tumblr have “show only the best stuff” settings that when they originally rolled out were turned on by default, but can (and should) be turned off.
Youtube, for whatever reason, did not include the option to disable their “show only the best stuff” algorithm, probably because the suggested solution is to use the click the bell so Youtube subs get forced in to your notifications drop down.
Youtube has, in the past, been very weird about their treatment of the subscriptions page. I remember a point where they were threatening to get rid of it entirely.They probably have metrics on it that say it probably hurts viewership or whatever – if I had to take a shot in the dark, I’d say it probably has to do with discovery. If you think about the way Youtube is laid out, you are constantly assaulted with recommendations from all sides. 90% of Youtube.com’s front page is recommended videos, you get a sidebar for recommended videos that shows during everything you watch, if you have autoplay turned off then you get a screen of recommendations after the video finishes, and if you have autoplay turned on then it straight up just rolls in to whatever Youtube thinks you should be watching next, ad nauseam.
The subscriptions page throws a wrench in to that. Subscribe to ten channels, bookmark the subscriptions feed, and you can get cozy, only watching those ten channels from now until the day they get shut down from copyright strikes. Youtube doesn’t want you to be cozy. Youtube wants to show you more stuff. They want you clicking recommendations, they want you discovering new channels, they want you out there exploring and watching as much stuff as your eyes, brain, and ears will physically allow. The more you watch, the better metrics Youtube has to convince advertisers that their ads will be seen by a lot of people. The more Youtube can convince advertisers to advertise on Youtube, the more money Youtube itself makes.
So with your ten subscribers, maybe you watch an hour or less of Youtube per day. But if you didn’t have the subscriptions feed, maybe you’d watch two hours or three hours of Youtube out there just clicking on random junk you find in the search engine or through recommendation algorithms. So the subscriptions feed is bad for business, even if it’s good for users. Youtube thrives on serving you more than you thought you wanted to see.
(There are also political concerns about this that I won’t get on to; but letting a corporation control what you see, especially one as big and as influential as this, is a very dangerous, very slippery slope)
It may even be that Youtube knows that in doing this, they’re upsetting people, but it’s “better” to force people out in to other places on Youtube.com to find their videos. Because, again, it’s all about getting you out there and looking around instead of bunkered up in the subscriptions feed.
My basis for this is that I’ve actually had this happen at other sites when it comes to community forums. Some forums (like GAF, SomethingAwful, etc.) have “chat threads” which are big hangouts where people gather not to discuss any individual piece of news but just to chat in general about things. They are hubs, not focused discussions. And on more than one site I’ve visited, eventually the moderators will come in to a chat thread and voice their displeasure that those threads are too insular and they want more people in those threads to venture out and use the rest of the site for exactly the same reasons I’m assuming Youtube would rather you watch recommended content.
It’s one of those weird internet problems where I DEFINITELY don’t like it but I understand on some level why they have to do it.
