YouTube Subscribers Aren't Happy About The New Feed

YouTube is optimizing itself for views – more views, as many views as possible, at all costs. It begins with the changing of the chronology of the videos in YouTube subscriber feeds. This is real, it's happening, and for some users it's already happened. Instead of acting as a platform, as it should, YouTube is turning into Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It's becoming awful.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social sites are optimized for attention. They're no longer just platforms, they're finaglers. They're constantly evolving based on user, making certain that the things you look at and click on most often also APPEAR most often. If they can keep you browsing their social network all day long, they'll do it.

YouTube subscriber feeds were chronological for a long time now. YouTube was a platform where the creators of media could place their content and it'd be displayed in order for the end user, the viewer, to view. The platform setup is one that both consumers and creators take value from. As such, everyone is happy and all parties grow.

"We are currently experimenting with how to show content in the subs feed," said a YouTube representative on Twitter. "We find that some viewers are able to more easily find the videos they want to watch when we order the subs feed in a personalized order vs always showing most recent video first."

That's not in search, it's in a subscription feed. YouTube subscribers of all sorts – those that are set to be directly affected – are displeased with this change.

With chronology, the content creator and the end user have the ability to control what content they see, and in which order they'd like to see it. Without chronology, it's YouTube that decides what's served, and who gets to see it, and when.

If news organizations did this, the world would be an absolute mess. Instead of delivering the news of the day, they'd show only the most engaging stories from any point in the history of the world. It wouldn't be news anymore, it'd be an all-out war for your attention, without regard for the costs. That's what's happening to YouTube. That's what's already happened to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, too. Jeepers help us.

This is where some blogs would tell you what to do to fix everything. I'm gonna go ahead and assume you already know how to do that. The link is right up above.