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.
My main reaction when I saw this us “wait? Nobody uses subscriptions?” When nearly exclusively use my subscriptions to look at things and maybe one or twice a week go on the home tab because YouTube home tab is fucking garbage. I also do this on other platforms where I have my followed tab I watch.
Right?! It’s the same for me!
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.
(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
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.
It’s not like the notifications go to my phone or anything.
I’m so glad this was algorithmically recommended. Thanks lemmings!
I mean, algorithms are not bad at all if they are transparent. The “scaled” sorting in Lemmy is an algorithm and it does work great. You can take a look at the source code and see how it works. The problem here is not “algorithms” and we really shouldn’t call it “algorithms” - it’s tech companies force feeding you content they want you to see and preventing you from seeing the sites/posts/users you are actively following from reaching your feed. What Musk is doing on X is propaganda and we should call it that
Yeah, I’m here for a reason. It takes a lot of blocking/filtering too. But the reason I am here is my desire for “algorithmic complacency”. I like to spend some time mentally wandering.
Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.
That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.
Person who invented sorting algorithms watching you sort by new “to avoid algorithms”:
(yes, I’m also guilty of milking the ancient computer science vs. venture capital vocabulary joke; if you wanna start a flamewar better do it about “sorting” vs “ordering”)
Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.
When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.
I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.
