Enshittification

You know what I wish they would do? I wish they would invent the concept of "shows."

Like you know how on old fashioned tube television you could tune the primitive analog radio receiver to pre-selected narrow frequency bands referred to by the ancient ones as "channels" and on these "channels" one might find a collection of different, though sometimes related "shows." Like on the Discovery "Channel" might produce wildlife documentaries and space documentaries?

There hasn't been a robust way to do that on Youtube since at least the Johnson administration. I'll give the example of Linus Media Group, who operate 14.04*10^666 different channels which are generally related, made mostly by the same creative staff, on broadly the same topics, but Youtube treats them as 100% unrelated. According to Youtube's UI, TechQuickie is as related to Linus Tech Tips as RedLetterMedia is.

You can kind of get this done with playlists. But...when a stupid penis is pushed into an idiot vagina, a moron baby shall soon be born. Youtube doesn't provide a robust playlist controls, and youtubers want people to be able to access the latest episodes, so now Youtube is full of playlists that are backwards with their oldest entries at the bottom.

One account can't silo their own content by topic in a way that's meaningful to the UI. Like, if you like RedLetterMedia for Best of the Worst and Re:View but don't care for Half In the Bag...Go find the nearest anvil, hammer your dick flat and take a 2D piss up a rope for all the good it'll do you.

With a "show" system, you could subscribe to the specific shows you like. This would count as a subscriber for the creator's metrics because a viewer is engaging with them, and they could see which shows are most popular with their viewers to prioritize that content, which should boost engagement. Or, if you like the creator's personality, you could generally subscribe and get notifications on everything they publish. Interested viewers would get notified of the latest shows directly without having to navigate a playlist, and newcoming viewers who discover a creator later on could watch a show from the beginning too. If engagement is what Youtube wants, surely someone stumbling upon a long running series and then lapping up the entire back catalog is a way to achieve this. If they wanted to boost engagement surely they'd want to create a way to more easily attach "second channels" to their main ones. How many people would watch the lower production effort asides/live stream dumps that they're hosting if they lowered the UI pain in the neck?