The Nature of YouTube

YouTube is an incredible platform that has changed the face of online media consumption. It’s grown to rake in billions of dollars a year, people can establish careers for themselves making the content they want to make and it’s become quite the dense interface to navigate! As they expand and add features, the pages have become more complex—this is the nature of a content-first platform. I’m not here to say they need to tear everything down and build YouTube from the ground up again, but it’s high time we get some features that allow us to further customize our experience. In specific, YouTube adding folders would be a game changer on multiple levels 🤯.

So Many… Too Many Options

With such a big platform, different aspects of YouTube are not developed at the same pace. I little nudge here, a little shift there. With such an approach, some areas start to lose unity. Let’s take a look at the side bar for instance—It’s your core navigation pain as well as home for subscriptions, trending and more. There are so many options there that I never use, and I mean NEVER. Look down below, there are so many options here outside of basic site navigation that fill the sidebar. I have to scroll down to see all the options! I’d like to be able to hide a bunch of those if I could, but I’ll do a proper list of improvements I’d like to see later.

OK time for a lil tangent before I get into folders… Look at this side bar! Multiple inconsistencies that are such simple fixes:

• Some dividers extend all the way to the left while others don’t

• Section titles have different font weights (eg. ‘You’ and ‘Subscriptions)

• The active selection at the top does not fill the space to the right fully

• Subscriptions is both a page to navigate to and a sidebar list

I don’t have more thoroughly fleshed out ideas as to get this side panel a bit more organized at the moment, but I do know I’d love to see folders swoop in and help to start tidying things up!

Folders: Customize Your YouTube

I'm the kinda guy who has multiple YouTube channels/profiles so I can tailor my feed and algorithm to specific kinds of channels and content. Even within a specific profile, I enjoy a range of subcategories and miscellaneous content—I'd love to be able to tidy up that subscription section! What if I could group similar channels together in a folder so I can find all my favourite DIY content? What if I could separate my interest in camera gear and other categories too so I could create a tailored feeds of just that content within one profile?

The way the subscriptions in the side bar work is based on engagement/watch time. Your most watched channels hover around the top and the ones you don't watch so often start ranking lower and lower. The list only shows you 7 channels, you'll have to expand the list to start scrolling and see more. If you're like me and you're subscribed too 200+ channels, it can be hard to scroll through the list and find who you are looking for, especially if you are generally familiar with the content but don't remember the name of the channel. I've spent time going through the whole list trying to find a specific person, and by the time I get to the end of the list I might have glazed over them.

If it was possible to group channels together any way we wanted, we'd be able to hone in on specific categories/styles with ease—it'd probably help out YouTube's algorithm too to see how we arrange our content. A further implementation of this would be the ability to customize our home screens. What if when we launched YT we could have a section with videos presented to us from a specific folder we created? That would be pretty damn sweet! Maybe one day we'll get a feature like this. Until then, I'll just be switching between my numerous profiles so I don't confuse one single algorithm too much 😆.