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Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

I got super excited for that YouTube functionality, then I clicked the link and realized that either I follow way too many people for this to be useful, or the people I follow are producing way more content than I can handle. I guess maybe if I "un-ring" the bell for a few of the bigger channels this could be useful...

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People harp on social media algorithms but this right here is the actual problem. Your stated preferences, to see and be notified of all those videos, run contrary to your revealed preferences. And services catering to the former will lose to services catering to the latter. By harboring these mismatches we train these systems to ignore what we say we want or risk losing profits and market share.

The problem is that engagement is a poor proxy for preference.

Every morning I to go youtube and check my subscriptions for new videos. I have zero bell notifications because I just find it really annoying. I work from home most days so I play the interesting new videos that day from my subscriptions and really don't bother with anything else.

It's painful, but I have pruned my subscription list of people who upload often but I rarely watch. At this point my YouTube subscription list is channels where I open the video more than 50% of the time.

I don't know if that's "fair" or not, but it's how I keep the subscription page useful.

Yeah I did the same. I find the best way to use YouTube with a lot of subscriptions is just to click the subscriptions list and it shows you who has a new video and you can decide what you're in the mood for based on the channel.

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