YouTube is continuing its experiment that targets those people who turn on notifications for a channel, set the option to "All," and then completely forget to watch a single video. You know the type. They get bombarded with notifications for every upload, only to swipe them away in frustration.
In this experiment, YouTube says that if you have not engaged with a specific channel recently, despite having received push notifications from it, the platform simply will not send you any more push notifications for new content from that channel.
New videos will still show up in your Subscriptions feed and your in-app notification inbox, so you will not miss anything entirely, but your phone will not buzz with a new alert. Channels that do not upload very often will not see their notification delivery altered by this test.
The company"s logic is that users get so overwhelmed that they just turn off all notifications from the YouTube app entirely. This blanket ban then affects creators whom you actually do watch. As the company put it:
When viewers turn off all notifications from YouTube, all creators are unable to reach even their most engaged viewers outside the app. The goal of this experiment is to help us find ways to reduce this problem.
Improved push notifications are not the only experiment the video giant has been running lately. Last November, it began testing a feature that lets you share videos and talk with others right inside the app.
The test, limited to users 18 or older in Ireland and Poland, revives an old in-app messaging feature from 2017, allowing people to send long-form videos, Shorts, and live streams without jumping over to a separate messaging service. You can start a conversation from the share menu and find your messages under the notification bell icon.
More recently, the video giant began testing a feature that injects image posts within the Shorts feed, allowing creators to drop a maximum of 10 images or GIFs in a post, though without background music for now.