Back in May ’12 I posted a video explaining why changes YouTube made to the subscription feed were bad for both creators and the users. The complaint is primarily directed at the “highlights for feed” filter, which works similar to the activity feed filter on Facebook where it only shows posts based on your recent history with the poster. YouTube’s filter is different in that it favors big channels over smaller channels (making it hard for a small creator to grow in views).
Although YouTube’s made some slight changes to the feed since I created this video, the complaints are still pretty relevant.
I still get comments to this video, mostly recently;
It just goes to show that although YouTube is the present leader in video-sharing sites that doesn’t mean it’s the best designed site. People always tell me they believe it’ll be hard to get people to switch from watching content on YouTube to watching the same videos through Martell TV, but if you spend time engaging with the people who actively use YouTube, you’ll understand there is a huge demand for a better user experience than what YouTube provides.
People come to YouTube for the content it has, not for the user experience it has. If that same content can be accessed somewhere else and the UX is better, they’ll gravitate toward the better platform.
