I consistently hear people on YouTube complain that the subscribe button doesn’t do anything for viewers, now that channel notifications are controlled by the bell. But it does do something: it puts the videos from that channel in your subscription feed, which is readily accessible on all versions of YouTube. So why do people act like it doesn’t exist? I think it’s super convenient, especially if you’re subscribed to a ton of channels and don’t want your notifications feed flooded with new videos.

    • @AuxEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Items temporarily disappear from sub page due to distributed nature of YouTube. It has too much information and too many users to work in a traditional way. This is not an “algorithm”, it’s just a synchronisation issue. It happens on all huge platforms. People frequently “disappear” from your friend list on Facebook and then reappear a couple of days later.

      YouTube added a bell to reduce synchronization issues. Bells are temporary notifications, not persistent data, so it is handled completely differently.