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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

Incidentally, those same conditions seems to apply to other sites. Lots of Youtubers have multiple channels (a main channel, a livestream channel, a shorts channel).

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I've thought many times over the years that I would love to be able to subscribe to a particular playlist or "show" from a channel. There is several channels that I want to see their main stuff, but not their side content. Or a particular game from a lets-play-er, but not their other games.

Surprisingly Youtube did have that functionality, though it was removed quite a while ago. I specifically remembering being able to subscribe to "Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This?" (in the late '2000s time range), without also subscribing to the other videos on the channel.

It doesn't work exactly the same as a subscription, but you can add a playlist from a channel to your library, if the channel offers one that fits what you want.

For example the channel Accursed Farms puts out a Half-Life based show called Freeman's Mind which I love, but I'm not huge on the rest of their content, so I follow their playlist and can easily get just the content I want.

Same here, but cynic in me says that they want to increase your engagement by spamming you with more content that you MIGHT also want to watch.

There's nothing cynical about that take, it's a fact this is how YouTube (and modern social media) operate. Longer eyeball time == more ad revenue.

Pitch meetings and Ars Technicas interviews about old games come to mind. Fortunately, pitch meetings got his own channel last year.

I don’t think it’s only helpful to the algorithm. It’s also helpful for me as a subscriber.

If I want to watch episodes of Breaking Bad, I don’t want you to randomly throw in episodes or M*A*S*H (even though both are good).

I wrote about this - https://www.atomic14.com/2023/03/06/the-curse-of-youtube.htm...

To be honest it's pretty horrible. Why can't I just post about what interests me right now?

When you say:

> Why can't I just post about what interests me right now?

You mean you can’t post without probably messing with some bizarre algorithm that is running YouTube discovery?

Because I’m quite sure you can post about whatever you want.

The problem I see is that you’re mixing two aspects of the creation process.

There’s your desire and curiosity driving you towards creating videos on one end there’s whatever YouTube wants on the other which usually is keeping people glued on their phones to consume as much content as they can.

It’s up to you to decide what is more valuable here. If you want to play the YouTube game you have to accept their idiotic rules which includes posting daily, making stupid shorts, making reactionary content and all that.

OR you can decide that it’s more important for you to make videos you find interesting and stop caring about vanity metrics.

Side note: those three images in your post are completely unnecessary and add nothing to the overall quality of the post. I’d personally remove them and stick with just the content.

But that’s just my 2c

This is very true - I try and keep YouTube fun for me - if it gets to the point where it’s the same as work then there’s not much point.

My wife is a amateur painter but would like to make more of it. I always tell he that she should paint what she wants and make pictures she enjoys.

Her art club is currently running an exhibition and none of her paintings have sold so far.

You can, but it's the equivalent of completely changing the topic of a conversation. Do that enough, and people will be less keen on listening to you.

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