sigmaleph | (no subject)

I keep seeing youtubers talking about stats re: which fraction of the people watching their videos are subscribers and begging at non-subscriber viewers to subscribe, which, like, yeah it's annoying but I understand the incentives at play here and I find it hard to blame them, etc.

but it amuses because, since YouTube disabled email notifications, my method of finding out new videos have come out is rss feeds. You don't need to subscribe to a channel to add its feed to a reader, and I don't get any notifications from channels I am subscribed to, so it makes zero practical difference to my experience if I am or am not subscribed to a channel. It has gone from being a practical utility that, as an incidental side effect, changes a stat The Algorithm can respond to, to something I only do because I might want to change that stat, as a sort of minimal thank you. A subscribe is basically just a channel-wide 'like', now.

Google maintains that the number of users who relied on email notifications was small enough to be irrelevant, and that still sounds weird to me but I guess they'd know, and if that number was small then people with my current mode of interaction are presumably irrelevant squared. Still. I find it funny.

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What *is* the normal method of finding out about new videos then? I use the subscription list as a kind of special bookmarks list for youtube channels and then click to specific channels to check them (mostly because the "new videos" marker on that list is somewhere between unreliable and blatently incorrect), and that doesn't feel like the typical way of doing things either but it's probably closer?

mobile push notifications, I'd guess, but IDK. For all I know the normal way is to not subscribe to things and let The Algorithm decide.

Our youtube bookmark in our browser is https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

so we still get the classic "list of all videos by channels you subscribed to, newest to oldest" effect.

We do look through the recommended slush feed though, when we've caught up on our subs.

Makes sense, if you use it more than me and have better curation, I guess?

(Also re "mobile push notifications, I'd guess, but IDK. For all I know the normal way is to not subscribe to things and let The Algorithm decide."
- wow that's a terrifying possibility but plausible?)