Is social media becoming antisocial?
More and more it is becoming apparent that social media platforms are trying to
think for us. They are constantly updating algorithms that take your interests
away from you. You can see it happening all over the place, on many different
platforms and if you ask me it is beginning to get out of control.
The first time I had realized this was on Facebook. When you have a page (not just a profile) on Facebook, it is your job to promote that page as best you can, but do you have the power to even do that anymore? The answer is no. Facebook has taken your power away from you and more and more they continue to make your page less visible to the people that like your page because they want to see your stuff. They limit who sees your work and only let it out to a choice few of your followers. If they randomly pick the few followers that are only lookyloo’s who do not like or comment, than your post is stuck in limbo waiting for another random follower to either come to your page and look for themselves, or maybe it gets dropped into their timeline at a later date… but the chances of that are slim.
Then Instagram started to do the same and people eventually started to notice they were not seeing everything, but only what Instagram wanted you to see. They followed the same example as Facebook, but without the monetary incentive Facebook uses to try and make you purchase views.
Well, now YouTube appears to be jumping on this bandwagon and is now slowly starting to limit views. I have started noticing that channels I follow are not getting put into my “subscription” feed. So I started checking around with other people I know and asked them if they were seeing this as well… and lo and behold, they are. How far will YouTube take it? Are they just limiting views or are they going to take it to the Facebook level?
One of the main reasons people use YouTube is the possibility that you can make some money down the road, (don’t even get me started on the 10,000 view thing) but what happens if YouTube eventually decides that it is you that should be paying them to let people that have subscribed to your channel get notifications from your channel?
Am I being an alarmist here? Maybe I am, but with the increasing amount of sites that are getting into the limiting business, shouldn’t I be worried about it? Are you?
The first time I had realized this was on Facebook. When you have a page (not just a profile) on Facebook, it is your job to promote that page as best you can, but do you have the power to even do that anymore? The answer is no. Facebook has taken your power away from you and more and more they continue to make your page less visible to the people that like your page because they want to see your stuff. They limit who sees your work and only let it out to a choice few of your followers. If they randomly pick the few followers that are only lookyloo’s who do not like or comment, than your post is stuck in limbo waiting for another random follower to either come to your page and look for themselves, or maybe it gets dropped into their timeline at a later date… but the chances of that are slim.
Then Instagram started to do the same and people eventually started to notice they were not seeing everything, but only what Instagram wanted you to see. They followed the same example as Facebook, but without the monetary incentive Facebook uses to try and make you purchase views.
Well, now YouTube appears to be jumping on this bandwagon and is now slowly starting to limit views. I have started noticing that channels I follow are not getting put into my “subscription” feed. So I started checking around with other people I know and asked them if they were seeing this as well… and lo and behold, they are. How far will YouTube take it? Are they just limiting views or are they going to take it to the Facebook level?
One of the main reasons people use YouTube is the possibility that you can make some money down the road, (don’t even get me started on the 10,000 view thing) but what happens if YouTube eventually decides that it is you that should be paying them to let people that have subscribed to your channel get notifications from your channel?
Am I being an alarmist here? Maybe I am, but with the increasing amount of sites that are getting into the limiting business, shouldn’t I be worried about it? Are you?
Would love to hear your opinions on this, if you have
something to say, feel free to leave a comment below.
For the record: YouTube actually started to do this back in 2012, but has recently made some changes that is making it far more active in its subscription hiding.
