If you look at the creators on there, the majority of them create fairly similar content. Most of them are either educational or video essay channels. They are mostly banking on the fact that if you like some of these creators, chances are you will like most of them. It seems like they are targeting a specific niche of people and it's definitely not meant to be for everyone. It's their own little walled garden, a shared patreon if you will.

This seems be directed at creators interested in their platform, which would be their audience at this stage. The "algorithm" on YouTube can decide whether or not a video will be discovered. Guaranteeing that subscribers will see their recent content could be a good selling point.

>Guaranteeing that subscribers will see their recent content could be a good selling point.

Sorry, doesn't Youtube already do that? I subscribe to 20-30 channels, and in my subscriptions feed it simply shows all the videos from channels I'm subscribed to in reverse chronological order - exactly the way people say they want to see these feeds.

Youtube used to do that, until at some point they added the “bell” feature and converted all subscriptions to subscriptions-without-a-bell which means only some videos get put in your feed. Of course, if you go the extra step to click the bell icon you get the notifications like usual.

I thought the bell was just for push notifications vs no push notifications?

That is also what I thought. My subscriptions feed shows only videos, not other posts and notifications. As far as I can tell it shows all the videos. This seems like a reasonable default to me.

That is how it works to the best of my knowledge, but most users don't browse that way; they browse from the home page. Hence it's a perceived issue to a lot of creators. Not saying I agree that the answer is no recommendation engines ("algorithms"), though...

The bell controls notifications about new content, which was a change from older YouTube, where they would notify for all new videos for subscriptions on mobile. But as the userbase grew, so too did their subscription lists, so it really is a reasonable feature. So this is the "change" the YouTubers talk about.

So basically the issue, from the creator standpoint, is that Youtube gives users the ability to browse their subscriptions, or to look at a set of recommendations, and many users choose to look at the recommendations? Sounds like you have an issue with your subscribers, not with Youtube.

Even the bell is no longer reliable.

Could you give me an example of a video that's left out of your subscriptions feed: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

A quick check shows that every video posted by one of my subscribed channels (in the last week) appears in that feed. If that's not happening it sounds like some kind of bug.

> This seems be directed at creators interested in their platform, which would be their audience at this stage.

I rather doubt it. There's no information presented about how to sign up as a creator, and from statements elsewhere, they don't seem all that interested in bringing in new talent from outside their circle. (They believe they're already "the smartest, most creative people online" and "highly selective about who we work with" [0].)

Meanwhile, the niche that the creators represented here target is likely already conscious of YouTube's "algorithm" as an issue, thanks to countless video-essays on the topic authored by those creators over the years.

[0] https://standard.tv/pages/about

Based on what creators I watch on youtube frequently complain about the problem with youtube is less the recommendation algorithm and more the constant changing of rules around how the UX works, with little/no documentation. There's also the seemingly arbitrary demonetization of videos with little to no recourse from creators.

An example: you used to "subscribe" to a youtuber to get notifications about new videos, but then notifications frequently don't happen, then they added the little bell toggle which supposedly controls whether you get notifications or not, but then notifications still don't seem to happen all the time.

The trick is, you want to not screw with viewers you already have while still having discoverability tools for the rest. Theoretically this would be like what the sub page SHOULD be plus the home page that recommends stuff based on your viewing habits. Gimme both well segregated and I'm interested.