Summary
- YouTube is testing a new feature that will reduce push notifications for channels users have subscribed to with “All” notifications enabled but haven’t actively engaged with recently.
- The goal is to combat notification fatigue, which often leads users to disable all YouTube notifications instead of adjusting individual channel settings.
- While push notifications may be limited, users will still be able to find all notifications within the YouTube app’s notification inbox.
Soon after testing out a feature that shows video suggestions in the ‘Now Playing’ queue view, streaming giant YouTube is now experimenting with a new feature that will help users cut out the noise — noise that users initially opted into.
For reference, when you subscribe to a channel on YouTube, you have the option to set notifications from it to None, Personalized, and All. The streaming giant’s latest experiment pertains to only those who have notifications for specific channels set to the latter — All.
YouTube’s newest experiment adds recommendations right in the playback queue
Only available to Premium users, for now
Alerts from channels set to ‘All’ appear as push notifications on your device, and also within YouTube’s dedicated in-app notification section (the bell icon on the top right🔔).
The only reason you’d want to set notifications to ‘All’ is if you really enjoy a specific channel/creator’s content and want to stay in the loop with every upload and community post. However, interests change, and channels that you used to love a year ago might not be on top of your to-watch priority list today. When this happens, notifications from that channel quickly become noise, and instead of tweaking the specific channel’s notification settings, users often resort to outright disabling YouTube notifications from their devices system settings.
YouTube’s latest experiment wants to help you cut back on noise by only sending push notifications for channels that you actively engage with (via Android Authority).
In-app notifications remain unaffected
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Rolling out only to a limited number of users for now, if you’ve recently engaged with channels for which you’ve set the notification preference as ‘All,’ this experiment won’t really affect you. However, “viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications in the experiment,” wrote YouTube.
Users won’t lose complete access to channel notifications as they’ll still be visible in the dedicated in-app notification section — the experiment will only limit push notifications. Additionally, channels that upload infrequently will be exempt from the change, so you might not lose push notifications all across the board.
There’s no guarantee if and when this might roll out widely. However, it does strike a balance between notification clutter and ensuring that channels can still effectively reach their audience.
