Hello!

I’ve been watching YouTube videos and content creators for somewhere nearing ten years now and I have a lot of thoughts about how dumb some of the site changes have been, but here’s my biggest gripe and oh boy, plug in your seatbelts boys and girls because I have some opinions.

What is the point of a subscribe button, if the subscription feed doesn’t give you a list of all the videos from the channels you’ve subscribed too?

I get the point of algorithms – how is anyone going to find new content if there aren’t algorithms to figure out what you’ll really like? But save them for the home page! Or the suggested videos around a video when you’re watching.

subscription  (səbˈskrɪpʃ(ə)n/)  noun

an arrangement to receive something, typically a publication, regularly by paying in advance.

“make sure you get a copy every month by taking out a subscription”

The definition of subscription – sure, YouTube is slightly different in that it’s a free platform and maybe that’s where their loophole is, but if I subscribe to a channel and then don’t ‘receive’ that video in my subscription feed, it’s not a subscription at all?

‘Subscribe’ has just become a phrase to YouTube at this point – it’s doesn’t mean that a creators videos get sent to certain people, it’s all about the numbers and YouTube only appears to be paying attention to those with tens of millions of numbers to their channel.

That must be all it is to them! Surely it’s obvious? Why would anyone subscribe to a channel if what they actually wanted was for someone to guess what they want to watch?

There’s only so accurate that YouTube can be! For one, I don’t want an algorithm to try and tell me what I want to watch when what I want to watch it what I’ve subscribed to – it’s that simple! On my channel, I’m the only one making content but my boyfriend often watches videos on my channel and what he watches it completely and utterly different to what I watch. I don’t hate it, but I’m not subscribed for a reason.

But now YouTube thinks all I want to watch is vine compilations and gaming livestreams and that’s not the case. Not even a little bit.

I’m not sure what else there is to say – I think it would be really interesting if YouTube put out a survey and asked what people actually wanted from the sub feed, because I’d be legitimately surprised if the majority came out saying people want it how it is now.

And don’t even get my started on why social media news feeds aren’t chronological.

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx

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