YouTube, following its recent experiment with displaying video recommendations in the ‘Now Playing’ queue, is now testing a feature aimed at helping users eliminate unwanted sound — sound they initially opted to receive.
For your information, when you subscribe to a channel on YouTube, you can choose from three options for notifications: None, Personalized, and All. The latest experiment from the streaming giant is aimed only at those who have notifications for certain channels configured to the latter setting — All.
When you set channels to ‘All’, alerts will show up as push notifications on your device and in the dedicated notification section of the YouTube app.
The sole justification for opting for ‘All’ notifications is if you have a genuine liking for a particular channel/creator’s content and wish to be informed of every upload and community post. Nonetheless, interests evolve, and the channels you adored a year back may no longer feature at the top of your to-watch priority list today. When this occurs, notifications from that channel quickly turn into noise. Rather than adjusting the notification settings for that specific channel, users often opt to completely disable YouTube notifications in their device’s system settings.
The newest trial run by YouTube aims to reduce noise for you by limiting push notifications to only those channels with which you interact actively.
This is currently being rolled out to only a limited number of users. If you’ve recently interacted with channels for which you’ve set your notification preference to ‘All,’ this experiment won’t have much of an impact on you. However, YouTube stated that “viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications in the experiment.”
The experiment will only restrict push notifications, so users will still be able to see channel notifications in the dedicated in-app notification section. Furthermore, channels that do not upload often will be excluded from this change, meaning you may not lose push notifications entirely.
It is uncertain if and when this will be widely implemented. Nonetheless, it manages to find a middle ground between notification clutter and the necessity for channels to still effectively connect with their audience.
