I recently came across a post on Android Authority that a viewer, James Randolph, flagged for me, and it highlights an experimental shift YouTube is making to its notification system. It looks like YouTube is quietly testing changes that could result in fewer notifications being sent—even if you’ve clicked the bell for a channel. The gist is that if you’re not actively engaging with a channel you’ve subscribed to, YouTube might just stop sending you notifications from it altogether.
I take a look at this experiment in my latest video.
The details come from a March 26th entry on YouTube’s experiment page. Initially this is a small test targeting people who’ve clicked the bell for “all” notifications but haven’t been watching those channels lately. YouTube’s reasoning? A lot of people, overwhelmed by the flood of notifications, either stop engaging or turn off all notifications at the app level.
From YouTube’s perspective, this is about cleaning things up. But to me, it seems like a fix for a problem that was never really handled well in the first place.
For years, creators like myself have been dealing with how unreliable the bell icon has become. According to my analytics, only about 10% of my subscribers actually click the bell. But of those, just 3.9% actually enabled YouTube notifications on their device.
One of my longstanding issues with the bell is how rigid it is. It pings right when a video goes live, regardless of whether it’s a good time for the viewer. Most people aren’t going to stop what they’re doing and watch immediately. For my part, I started using YouTube’s scheduled digest feature. I have all my notifications come in at 7:00 p.m. every day. That way I can review everything at once and decide what I actually want to watch. Most users likely don’t use that feature.
Another issue is the inability to add a video to the “Watch Later” list directly from a notification. Personally, I rely on the Watch Later heavily. I’ll often find something I want to check out later in the evening on the TV, and being able to queue it up is a big part of how I use YouTube. That functionality is just missing from the notifications tab.
When YouTube first introduced the bell, it was a compromise to give viewers more control after the algorithm started more aggressively recommending videos. People were frustrated that they weren’t seeing videos from creators they cared about. The bell was meant to restore that connection. But the way it was implemented—again, notifying you at the exact moment of publication—just doesn’t work for most people.
There are also little things about how the system works that don’t help. Take the example of turning off notifications for a specific channel from the notification bell menu in the YouTube apps. Turning off notifications from that menu doesn’t revert to the default algorithmic notification setting, it stops ALL future notifications from that channel.
These are relatively small usability issues, but they add up. When YouTube says people aren’t using notifications or the subscription tab, my view is that it’s not because they don’t want to—it’s because the features don’t work well for them. I’ve looked at my own analytics and have seen the same trend. Even though my subscriber count has nearly doubled since 2018, the thumbnail impressions I get from the subscription tab continue to decline. It’s not for lack of interest. It’s just that the tool itself hasn’t evolved in a way that supports how people actually watch videos.
YouTube’s algorithm clearly does a good job keeping people on the platform. But some of us prefer a little more manual control over what we see and when. I for one like to see what I’m choosing not to watch. A few thoughtful changes—both to how notifications behave and to the usability of the subscription tab—could go a long way for viewers who use YouTube as their primary video platform.