No Stupid Questions

On iOS iPad, the subscription feed doesn’t update/refresh after watching a video. The video remains in the queue (same place), with the red progress bar showing that it’s been watched or partially watched. Pulling down to refresh does nothing. Plus, I don’t want to watch every video from every subscription.

So instead, I use the algorithm in a way that benefits me. I let it suggest videos to watch until I feel it’s lost its way. Then I have to go and find videos from my primary interest to get the algorithm back on track.

My theory for the apparent need of "click the bell for notifications" is not that videos don't show up in the subscription feed but that most people just use the home page to get informed which does not show all content. My subscription feed worked without a hitch and not a single missed video since it's inception. I strongly believe most people just don't know about the subscription feed.

I feel like the main page though for Youtube now is essentially just a subscription feed. I watch a random video on any fucking topic, and suddenly either that channel or that topic DOMINATES my main page. My kids watch videos on my account and now my home page is just filled with crappy minecraft/roblox youtuber videos and non-sensical kid's videogame content. Like, is there an r/all version of Youtube where I can just see what videos are popular and trending with everybody? Sometimes I just want out of my small world of interests and just want to see what kind of trash everybody else is getting into. Or has society lost its collective mind and the same shit my kids are watching just so happens to be the same crap that the rest of the world is watching? I feel like I tend to see hyper-specific videos that likely only I watch on there though, and seeing other people's home pages I can tell that they're getting individualized feeds as well, so I don't think it just so happens that I'm culturally aligned with the rest of the world.

I have subscribed to so many channels (like, 800 of them by this point), that sometimes my subscription feed turns to shit, so I simply decide not to use it anymore.

Nowadays I only use it when I want to access my list of subscriptions.

Over time that subscriber section has become less prominent. At one time it was the way to find content you wanted to see. I think most people now just use the feed YouTube gives you.

Subscribing does seem to affect the algorithm. If nothing else it should help the creator pay the bills so you can keep getting videos from them.

I get too many Notifs from the YouTube app for channels I don't want. I use Newpipe Subscriptions, I can refresh feeds from multiple channels whenever I choose.

Maybe unrelated but what I do when I find a good channel: I click their name, go to their videos tab and look if there's other good stuff. Often videos a bit older have very few views while the newer one has loads, which makes me think nobody ever clicks through all this.

But I also don't log in to Youtube. I had a separate Youtube account until they forced me to use a Google account. I can always delete my YouTube cookies when the recommendations get to shitty.

Seems like most people just click videos from their home page and not their subscriptions feed. If YouTube set the default page as your subscriptions we wouldn’t have that bell problem anymore but that’s not good for engagement cause people wouldn’t see different videos every time they opened YouTube so it’ll never change

It's because the hot the button every time the channel asks them, constantly toggling it off an on.

Honestly I rarely do. I almost exclusively use the for you page and click what I want to watch

Honestly I try to only use the subscription feed because the home feed is addictive. I installed the unhook addon to block as many recommendations and other algorithmic things as possible, and try to just search when I want to find a particular thing.

However, sometimes I find myself running out of ideas and just disabling unhook and watching a few things from the home feed before reenabling it and going back to subscriptions only. I think if I also disabled ublock, youtube would be infinitely less addictive, since it would shove ads in my face constantly, and I'd soon get fed up.

I don't use YouTube website at all. I'm not even logged in there. I use purely RSS feeds of my selected channels, and my RSS reader embeds those videos in its web UI. I hate all the noise of the standard YT.

Probably the same people who browse all on lemmy.world and complain about the garbage in "their feed".

I use it to catch up on the latest vids from account im following. Occasionally I’ll also browse the algorithm feed as well.

When the home page defaulted to the recommended view rather than subscriptions, many years ago, I simply saved the URL for the subscription feed as a favorite and that's it. I never had issues, all videos from all my subscriptions show up.