YouTube may stop sending you notifications from channels that you don't watch regularly: What it means for users

YouTube is testing a change to its notification system that will stop sending push notifications to users who have subscribed to channels with "All" notifications enabled but don't regularly engage with their content, the company announced this week. Even with push notifications turned on, users who haven't recently viewed videos from specific channels will be impacted by the experiment. In order to keep these users from being totally excluded from new content, they will continue to see updates in the Subscriptions tab and the YouTube app's notifications section even though they will no longer receive push notifications on their phones.According to a report by 9to5Google, YouTube clarified that "actively engaged viewers" will continue to receive all notifications from their favourite creators when set to "All," and that this test won't affect creators who post infrequently. The company said the experiment aims to prevent users from turning off all YouTube notifications due to overwhelming alerts, which would affect other creators trying to reach their audiences.More videos mean more views, which incentivises creators to keep uploading content. However, as YouTube explains, this can sometimes overwhelm users, who may then disable notifications for all of YouTube rather than adjusting them for that specific channel/creator.This creates a problem for other creators, as updates from their channels would no longer reach viewers in this scenario. YouTube says this experiment is being conducted to identify ways to address the issue and help creators reach their audiences more effectively. You should see no change to your notifications if it's a channel or creator you regularly watch.The experiment isn't new and has been in development since March last year, so it's likely already live on your account, even if you haven't noticed it. It's also possible that YouTube is expanding the scope of the experiment with this announcement a couple of days ago.