All Youtube channels have a subscribe button, but there is no good way for me to consume the videos from the channels once I have subscribed to them.
Youtube does show a list of all the subscribed channels on the left side bar. It also shows a big list of all the videos from all my subscribed channels sorted with the most recent at the top. But these become unweildy, once I have more than a couple of subscriptions.
At any time, I am in the mood to watch videos only from a specific topic, while the one-big-list has all of them mixed together. Channels that release videos more frequently clutter the feed. This totally frustrates me.
Youtube forces me to use the home screen where an algorithm or more likely an AI selects what videos I can watch next. These videos are not just from the channels I have subscribed, but a mish mash of videos that may or may not contain new videos from my subscriptions. Interestingly, there are automatically chosen topics using which I can filter the videos in the home screen, but they never match how I want to group them.
Does Youtube know about these problems? Most likely. But I guess none of the Product Managers and UX Designers at Youtube would dare to do anything about them. Fixing them would basically mean giving more control to the viewers and power to the channels through the direct connection it provides. Youtube as an intermediary, would lose its ability to monopolize the video streaming market.
The power that Youtube gets is turned directly into quarterly revenue. The AI that decdes what videos I can watch next hyper-optimizes for the hours that I spend on watching videos rather than what is good for my life. Google, Youtube's parent would care less. Google as a company would rather kill its customers and themselves in the long run, rather than leave some revenue on the table in the short term.
The side effect of this power is the addiction that it afflicts on the viewers and the arbitrary censorship that it ends up doing as it editorializes the home screen. This has been the pattern not just for Youtube, but Facebook and Twitter too. I hear, newer video platforms like TikTok have simply foregone even the illusion of a subscription mechanism.
Google once had this motto called "Don't be evil" which looks like has long been officially removed. The trust and good will that Google had in its initial days has been sold to the highest bidders. Products like the Google Reader are created and maintained to choke other alternatives and suddenly sunset, once they have served their purpose.
In such a hostile environment, there are still some places of refuge.
One of them which I have personally used and like is the NewPipe Android app. This allows to search and browse videos from channels and also group your subscriptions based on topics, so that, you can have a more focussed video session catching up on a specific topic. I still would like a few improvements on the video feed screen, but since it is open source, I should be able to add them myself. Or I could even create my own app using the NewPipeExtractor library, which is part of the same project and used by NewPipe.
Since NewPipe is not very amenable to Google's designs, it is not allowed on the official Play store. But you can still install it directly from their website or from the F-Droid app store as explained in their home page. It might sound daunting at first for someone who is not tech savy, but I promise, it is worth the effort.
NewPipe also does not display any ads that you would see with the official Youtube app or the website. This obviouly means, the channels lose the potential revenue. This may sound like a bad thing, but in the long run, the high quality channels will survive as people would be more willing to direcly fund them through their website or other means. The low quality ones, might wither away.
Overall I think these pirate apps keep the ecosystem healthy.
Here is my attempt at the UX for catching up with my subscriptions:
UX for TVs
UX for mobile
Edits
- 2024-04-26: Added link to the article on the degradation of Google Search to increase ad revenue.
- 2024-04-23: Paraphrased text and added UX mockups.