No Stupid Questions

Honestly I try to only use the subscription feed because the home feed is addictive. I installed the unhook addon to block as many recommendations and other algorithmic things as possible, and try to just search when I want to find a particular thing.

However, sometimes I find myself running out of ideas and just disabling unhook and watching a few things from the home feed before reenabling it and going back to subscriptions only. I think if I also disabled ublock, youtube would be infinitely less addictive, since it would shove ads in my face constantly, and I'd soon get fed up.

I use it. I have all notifications turned off, so that's how I keep up with my channels.

I don't mind the YouTube algorithm cause at least I still have the choice. With TikTok or shorts I have to actively scroll to not watch something. So I let the algorithm give me new stuff on youtube, but it tends to focus on one or two areas at a time. So if I want to see more gardening in my feed I use my sub feed and watch a few gardening vids and presto old vids from channels I'm subbed to and new vids from new channels or cool one offs from the algorithm.

But I don't like my sub feed because I have such varied interests and moods I'm not interested in 60% of it at any one time.

Maybe i misunderstood your question but i've also heard many say they weren't getting all the content from the channels they subbed to exactly on the subscriptions feed. Personally i've never noticed this but that's why some channels started recommending to also hit the bell.

Seems like most people just click videos from their home page and not their subscriptions feed. If YouTube set the default page as your subscriptions we wouldn’t have that bell problem anymore but that’s not good for engagement cause people wouldn’t see different videos every time they opened YouTube so it’ll never change

I have subscribed to so many channels (like, 800 of them by this point), that sometimes my subscription feed turns to shit, so I simply decide not to use it anymore.

Nowadays I only use it when I want to access my list of subscriptions.

I feel like the main page though for Youtube now is essentially just a subscription feed. I watch a random video on any fucking topic, and suddenly either that channel or that topic DOMINATES my main page. My kids watch videos on my account and now my home page is just filled with crappy minecraft/roblox youtuber videos and non-sensical kid's videogame content. Like, is there an r/all version of Youtube where I can just see what videos are popular and trending with everybody? Sometimes I just want out of my small world of interests and just want to see what kind of trash everybody else is getting into. Or has society lost its collective mind and the same shit my kids are watching just so happens to be the same crap that the rest of the world is watching? I feel like I tend to see hyper-specific videos that likely only I watch on there though, and seeing other people's home pages I can tell that they're getting individualized feeds as well, so I don't think it just so happens that I'm culturally aligned with the rest of the world.

Over time that subscriber section has become less prominent. At one time it was the way to find content you wanted to see. I think most people now just use the feed YouTube gives you.

Subscribing does seem to affect the algorithm. If nothing else it should help the creator pay the bills so you can keep getting videos from them.

I only used the subscription feed in invidious.

I get too many Notifs from the YouTube app for channels I don't want. I use Newpipe Subscriptions, I can refresh feeds from multiple channels whenever I choose.

I don't use the subscriptions feed that much, i often just watch something i search for or something that was recomended to me. But i still don't want to get notifications from the channels i subscribe to, so i have notifications disabled for Youtube.

I still see how the notification bell can be useful for people that want to get notifications from some channels only.

I use it, but I loathe having to scroll past random text posts, pics, and shorts before getting to content I actually subscribe to.

Honestly I rarely do. I almost exclusively use the for you page and click what I want to watch

I didn't even know that "the bell" was a thing, until just now. I use my Subscriptions feed almost exclusively.

I subscribe to a lot of channels, and they usually put out significantly more videos that I don't want to watch than videos that I do. I'll usually subscribe to a channel for a specific video in case they make more of that specific kind of video, but I won't care about their other stuff.

For example, I subscribe to the Game Grumps channel, but I only want to watch them play games that I've also played, or that I at least know enough about to follow along with the gameplay without focusing all of my attention on it. If they're playing a game I've never heard of - which they often do - then I don't care to watch it.

The algorithm does a better job of showing me the videos I actually want to see than the subscription feed does because it takes into account which specific videos I've seen and skipped for each of my subscriptions.

I don't

I use it to catch up on the latest vids from account im following. Occasionally I’ll also browse the algorithm feed as well.

I guess the answer would be yes for me, because I've never subscribed to any youtube videos. If I wanted to watch a youtube video, I'd search for it and click on it. Most of the time I probably use youtube without being logged in to a google account. Have no interest in "following" any youtubers.

I don't subscribe to anything. I search what i want to see, sometimes dabble a bit with the recommended feed until i search for the next thing.

It's not about the bell, with it Youtube also introduction the algorythm to the subscription feed and essentially made some videos not show up consistantly anymore if I am not totally wrong (it's been a while and I was a lot younger back then)