YouTube is testing disabling notifications from channels that viewers don’t engage with to reduce the number of notifications they receive. The video platform says that the test will particularly affect viewers who have selected the “All” option for notifications from a channel.
During the experiment, the notifications will still appear in the inbox, but “viewers who have not interacted with the channel recently, despite having been sent recent push notifications, will not receive them,” YouTube said in a statement. The goal is to discourage viewers from turning off notifications entirely just because they’ve received too many.
Many YouTube creators specifically ask people to subscribe and enable notifications so they know when a new video has been uploaded. The problem is that when you agree to receive “All” notifications, you’ll also be bombarded with notifications for what aren’t new uploads. There are ways to manage notifications, but YouTube claims that people usually turn them off at the app level when they get bored (which affects every channel they subscribe to) instead of trying to customize anything. For a creator who wants to maximize the number of people watching their videos, not being able to rely on push notifications to grab subscribers’ attention is a problem.
However, YouTube’s decision that some viewers should not receive notifications from a particular channel seems like an extreme solution. The company describes this test as “small,” but there are certainly more subtle ways to weed out push notifications that users don’t need.
