Challenges of Receiving High-Quality YouTube Content Efficiently

Have you ever subscribed to just keep the link? Of course, in this case, you start receiving video from this channel. But what if you don't want to receive any videos? You can copy the link to the channel instead of subscribing to it, but then you need to save this link somewhere. In such cases, it would be better to simplify the addition of the link.

Using the Channel groups and rating extension, you can group YouTube channels without subscribing, so you can find them easily by the link. The changes will be saved to Google Drive, allowing access from other devices.

Typically, if you have at least one news subscription, you receive dozens of new videos daily, which can make it harder to find videos on other topics. For more objective information, having several news sources is better, but managing all these subscriptions on YouTube is difficult because you cannot easily remove all news videos when no longer needed.

This extension acts as a YouTube subscription filter, allowing you to group subscriptions and create hierarchies. For example, all news channels can be combined into one group, separating them from other topics. You can then filter subscriptions to exclude this group and focus on other content.

High-quality content is often difficult to produce, so creators release videos less frequently. For example, science videos may appear less than once a month. You might have hundreds of such sources, each with a low video output frequency compared to news channels.

What is the problem if you want to receive high-quality content?

The problem is that you are managing many video sources with infrequent updates. The Channel groups and rating extension helps by organizing YouTube channels, supplementing YouTube's subscription manager with grouping functions. This allows you to create a structured hierarchy of sources to search and filter by category, topic, and content quality effectively.

Related questions

Why YouTube removed the Trending tab and alternatives with extension

Yes, they've removed another feature—just like they did with collections and the dislike counter.

Why does this keep happening?

I don't understand how you can remove something without offering a replacement. When developers change things, you expect them to at least keep the old functionality. Even if they want to simplify the interface by removing text and the link to the trending page, they could have just hidden it out of sight. That's always an option.

Could the reason for this removal be the computational cost of generating trends? As we remember, the trending page simply contained videos sorted by view count over a short period. This doesn't require AI; the maintenance cost is practically zero, especially since the necessary statistics are already being used for other features.

The main reason, I suspect, is simply because they can. In large companies, poor decisions are often made due to management issues and a lack of user feedback. But when a large company has a monopoly, the situation becomes much worse.

So, what can be done?
Let's take a closer look at the "trending" function. Was it really about global trends? Not exactly. If you changed your country in the settings, you would get completely different trends for each region. YouTube's trends showcased videos gaining a lot of views quickly, but the selection was also personalized to some degree.

You never had full control over how those videos were related to you. However, you can create your own trends through your subscriptions.

For example, the Channel groups and rating browser extension allows you to filter your subscriptions by view count. If you subscribe to channels that matter to you, you can use this filter to see which of their videos are getting the most traction—effectively creating a personalized trending feed.