I Did Some Cleaning of My YouTube Subscriptions before the New Year
I feel like other people should follow my lead as I figured out I followed a ton of unnecessary channels
Have you ever gone through and just looked at the sidebar to see who and what you’re subscribing to? I try to do this on a semi-regular basis. I go through every once in a while and clear out channels and influencers who just don’t interest me anymore or channels I’d long forgotten I’d ever even touched.
I even let it slip that I had been following Joe Rogan’s channel since back in the day. Believe me, I don’t like publicly admitting that as much as I felt finding out about it when it happened. My YouTube channel has been around a long time and I don’t even remember how or why I even followed him to begin with.
Knowing me, I probably did it ironically but I could’ve possibly passed through a brief phase a while ago where I listened to him unironically. I had over 200 subscriptions when I was going to clean everything out around Christmas time. This made the algorithm think that I’d like a ton of different but related content on my home page. I was getting conservative-leaning channels being suggested to me and I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to check that stuff out.
What I like is much different. I follow various city planners, transportation nerds, sports analysts, left-leaning political pundits, language learning videos, and global news channels just to name a few topics. I also like food and travel so those were in there as well. I noticed scrolling through a ton that there were a lot of redundancies and a lot of subpar content that I’d ended up subscribing to though.
I even found that I was subscribed to artists because I like music. I have a streaming service if I want to listen to their music. I don’t need to subscribe to someone’s whole channel to see their music pop up. The only time I’d ever want to do that is if it is a friend who’s musical or an indie artist who releases exclusively on the platform.
Other than that, I can go to my streaming subscription.
As I was going through, it didn’t take very long. It must’ve been less than an hour that I was going through my list. I would click on one of my subscriptions and scroll through the videos to see if I still wanted to subscribe. If I didn’t, I didn’t even hesitate, I just unsubscribed.
I did this as I kept scrolling the list and did this multiple times until I got down to a decent number that I was comfortable with. I finished this task only keeping 49 of the subscriptions I’d originally had.
I’ve had this account for over a decade, if not much longer, so there were also some in there I didn’t even recognize. I must’ve followed them so long ago and at a different time in my life. Some of the ones I deleted, I liked but the thing is, I knew that I didn’t need to be subscribed. I could just search out some of that content independently.
The point is I made a goal to reduce my list of clutter on my subscriptions page to reduce the amount of redundant and erroneous content on my wall. I already have issues with data consumption on my data network.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of getting caught in an endless spiral of watching mindless recommendation after mindless recommendation. I wouldn’t want a random Mr. Beast recommendation to pop up on my YouTube page one day. I don’t recommend his content to anyone who has half a brain.
I feel much more mindful when I go on YouTube now and I try not to get caught up in watching hours of mindless content at a time. Reducing the number of videos I have access to by reducing my subscriptions and only going to that section in the sidebar has helped me more carefully select what I tune into on my YouTube channel.
Have you ever thought about clearing out your YouTube subscriptions? Are there other ways you’ve found that help limit your video consumption from the platform? Do you even find it necessary to do that in the first place? Let me know your thoughts on my suggestion to reduce the clutter on your home and subscriptions page.
Thanks for reading.
