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.
The subscriptions thing is something I have been saying about YouTube for years. People are always complaining that the predictions are terrible but they never have subscriptions.
They are literally not using the app the way it’s supposed to be used and then complaining that it doesn’t work. Well yeah.
just like how people keep complaining about facebook groups.
they uprooted every community and hobby discussion board ever and move them to a platform that doesn’t support distribution of information then moan that it’s just spam and repeated engagement content.
The problems with that feed which he touched on in the video are pretty significant. If you subscribe to channels that put out lots of content and ones that rarely do, it becomes much harder to use.
One thing he didn’t mention is also that it’s not conducive to discovering and gradually catching up on the back catalogue of a new channel, which is something the home feed excels at.
I’m sure YouTube prefers you use the home feed and has no plans to improve subscriptions, and there are real issues with it, so it’ll probably continue to decline.
I’m not all that sure; don’t they get the same amount of money from ads no matter how you find them? And they get a hefty chunk on “Join” and “Thanks” payments (a 30% cut, IIRC), which people are less likely to spend on non-subscribed channels.
That’s a fair point, improving the subscription feed would be in their best interest for the people who use it, even if that number is low.
If you look at your Subscribed page and don’t see any updates, there’s a good chance you’ll leave YouTube without watching anything.
The Home page has a higher likelihood of tempting you to watch something you hadn’t planned on.