YouTube will display rounded subscriber count  - big deal or not? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2019, 10:20:40 pm
content: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/21/18634368/james-charles-tati-westbrook-tfue-subscriber-count-change-youtube-social-bladeJust heard of Youtube changing the way subscribers count is displayed and am curious if that is a big deal or not to you youtube afficionados

author: Yansi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2019, 10:36:50 pm
content: Not surprised. Both Micro$oft and Goolag are doing everything they can to fix their UI until broken completely.Showing the numbers rounded is plain retarded.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2019, 10:43:53 pm
content: It is a big dealInternet is serious business.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 12:15:44 am
content: I just watched a video by YT channel Veritasium where Derek gave a very detailed explanation of why he thinks one of his recent videos went viral. I got the impression if he didn't actually state it that subscriber count is a far less significant input into the algorithm driving view counts.So on that basis it doesn't seem very important to track subscriber counts. They don't show 1,673,989 anyway. Truncated or rounded what does it matter.If you want to know what your favourite youtuber does he recommended ringing the bell.Or rely on an increasing prevalence of clickbaity thumbnails. Distasteful though that may be.

author: Cliff Matthews
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 04:08:25 am
content: Wilfred, I certainly didn't like the part where Derek shows YT will "cut the strings" gradually from subscriptions, since I view channels almost totally now based on email alerts. I guess they want to be a bigger player in social engineering by taking back control over what we watch. Cody's Lab mentioned stress on YT issues as well (among other personal things).

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 04:51:35 am
content: Quote from: Cliff Matthews on May 22, 2019, 04:08:25 amDo I detect an undercurrent of suspicion as to Youtube's motives? Perhaps I'm ill at ease as well. But in truth I suspect they are simply motivated to maximise advertising revenue. Any social control will probably be an unfortunate consequence.My immediate concern is that creators will, of necessity, put up attention grabbing thumbnails and soon all will do it and the general noise will render them all as invisible as they would have been without them.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 04:59:56 am
content: If you noticed the article talked about the channels that solely rely on using the subscription statistics as the source of their content, so they may die as a result of that change, because YouTube will stop providing exact numbers.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 05:16:22 am
content: I think I must be weird. I don't use any youtube alerts, or emails, or notifications or whatever. When I want to watch youtube, I go to youtube and click on the subscriptions button to see in chronological order all the videos from those I subscribe to, I've never understood all the kerfuffle about notifications not working or whateverAnyway, I think public subscriber counts are nothing more than a worthless point scoring exercise and should be publicly removed entirely, it serves no purpose to the public to know that dumbarse1's channel has a million subscribers and dumbarse2's channel has 1.5 million or whatever.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 05:17:22 am
content: Yeah every change to YouTube seams to be for the worst.What google cares about is getting as much site wide watch time as possible. The more time people spend looking at your website the more ads you can show to them and the more money you can make from said ads. They don't really care who the videos you watch are made by, as long as you keep watching.I do have to admit that youtubes suggestions algorithm is pretty darn good. It figures out what you like and digs up good videos that you would never have come across even by searching for them. It's not perfect tho and sometimes it seams to obsess with a video for some reason, but overall it does a good job. But i don't see why you wouldn't reserve one line of videos on the youtube main page for only showing the most recent content from subscribed channels. If i subscribed to someone that means i want to know when they release a video, there is still the subscriptions tab on the left but does that always show all subscriptions? There ware complaints about subscriptions being broken, but its hard to notice if videos are being hidden from me.EDIT: Oh and the reason why having accurate non rounded subscriber numbers is very useful for analytical tracking of how a channel is doing. It can be overplayed over other factors such as the success of submitted videos to determine what makes people subscribe.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2019, 08:46:07 am
content: Quote from: wilfred on May 22, 2019, 04:51:35 amYou would be wrong. Silicon Valley is absolutely obsessed with politics ever since the early 2010s.A big deal of what they talk about is how technology influences people and what they should do to push the world in whatever they consider "right" direction.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2019, 11:49:24 am
content: It's done !Check your favourite YouTubers subs count !

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2019, 01:57:37 pm
content: Rounding to the nearest integer value suits me fine.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2019, 02:44:36 pm
content: Do they really have nothing better to do at Youtube?What's the point really?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2019, 03:27:20 pm
content: Quote from: wilfred on September 10, 2019, 01:57:37 pm

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 02:55:05 am
content: A much more likely scenario is that, like view counts, subscriber counts can never be precise anyway, due to the distributed nature of their infrastructure. Individual nodes will account for adds and subtracts, but only sync to the master database periodically. We already know that play counts aren't actually live, either.As such, rather than having people obsess over a few subscriber numberswhich won't be correct anyway, just round it.

author: Yansi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 08:09:24 am
content: They are I'd say quite live. Check and try.Problem is, that each place of your youtube channel shows different values. One is shown right below the video, another one when you look in your channel homepage and a different one in the (now stinking sh!te) Studio Beta.They usually do not differ by much, but come on, how difficult it is to stick to showing just one number?

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 08:14:25 am
content: I suspect its part of reducing there statistics processing load, as with larger rounding, they can wait much longer before they need to totalise there count. e.g. why push an update for 10,000 counts when its rounded to the nearest million.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 09:04:15 am
content: In the link provided in the first post the page links to a YT blog post that says this"Currently, all creators with over 1,000 subscribers see their subscriber counts displayed differently in different places across YouTube desktop and mobile apps. In some cases, the subscriber count is abbreviated (e.g., 133k) and in other places we display the full count (e.g., 133,017).To create more consistency everywhere that we publicly display subscriber counts, starting in August 2019, we’ll begin showing the abbreviated subscriber number across all public YouTube surfaces. Third parties that use YouTube’s API Services will also access the same public facing counts you see on YouTube. Creators will still be able to see their exact number of subscribers in YouTube Studio."They could equally create more consistency but displaying the full number not rounded anywhere.They go on to give the very specious sounding reason"We know subscriber counts are extremely important for creators and fans alike, so we wanted to give everyone a heads up a few months in advance of this change! We’ll share more specifics with creators as we get closer to the August 2019 date. "As if a heads up deals suitably with the extreme importance creators and fans alike place on precise subscriber numbers.A followup post 3 months later says a more plausible sounding and far less disingenuous sounding."We heard a lot of feedback from the community following our announcement in May and wanted to share more about why we’re making the change. Beyond creating more consistency, ​this addresses creator concerns about ​stress and ​wellbeing, specifically around tracking public subscriber counts in real time.​ ​We hope this helps all creators focus on telling their story, and​ experience less pressure​ about the numbers."https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6543166

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 06:00:18 pm
content: Quote from: Yansi on September 11, 2019, 08:09:24 amYou just proved my point: they're nottrulylive. Each node is showing a pseudo-live guesstimate, which is why they differ in different places.Quote from: Yansi on September 11, 2019, 08:09:24 amQuite difficult. Remember, there isn'toneyoutube server. There are thousands, possibly millions of them. They cache things as needed for performance, and in exchange for the performance, sacrifice some display accuracy, because some data, like subscriber and play counts, are only synced upstream periodically.Imagine that at the time of a sync, a video has 100,000 views. Now 50 different servers know "100,000", and then each one gets another 100 views. The servers don't send each view upstream immediately; that uses resources. So after some amount of time, a few hours perhaps, they sync again, and each one tells the upstream system "hey, I added another 100 views". The upstream system concatenates the additional views and comes to the new tally: 105,000, and all the servers now suddenly update from 100,100 to 105,000 views. Now, the thing is, unlike in my example here, the servers won't all sync at the same time. So two servers may have totally different play counts to show.This video explains it in greater detail:

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2019, 06:03:16 pm
content: See also:https://www.tubics.com/blog/what-counts-as-a-view-on-youtube/

author: Raj
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2019, 04:23:04 pm
content: I take a more skeptical approach to it...it's to allow for them ignoring your subscribing action.earlier, the subs incremented...now if they don't want you to be counted as a subscriber, they simply won't increment it.

author: SparkyFX
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2019, 08:52:18 pm
content: Quote from: Raj on September 12, 2019, 04:23:04 pmWhich means you believe they tripled their effort in building that system just to do double accounting and display a channel to every subscriber as subscribed, but not to the channel. Whats the point in that and why should that not have been possible before? Sorry, but that´s conspiracy theory territory.They need to count across a distributed system with plenty of load balancing in between. You are not going to see a live value anyway, at best they display your interaction via javascript locally, send it back and synchronize somewhat later in the day with every other hosting location.

author: SteveyG
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 17, 2019, 12:45:29 pm
content: Quote from: Rerouter on September 11, 2019, 08:14:25 amThis was the reasoning mentioned on the YouTube posts about it. A lot of sources pull subscriber data and it was calculated on demand, but with increasing numbers of channels that's not a useful way to use processing power.