Alternating Notifications and YouTube's Algorithm

I hate it when I have to deal with YouTube's algorithm and push notifications. If you're planning on posting a ton of content, just posting it to YouTube may not work if your viewers haven't started seeing it yet. They only get three notifications per day, which can be frustrating for creators who rely on these notifications to promote their videos. When I disable all push notifications, I still only get access to those three notifications per day.

This highlights the limitations of YouTube's algorithm and push notification system. On platforms like TikTok or Instagram, you often have more control over how your content is presented and discovered by users. The algorithm on these platforms can be more responsive to changes in user behavior, which means that popular creators may not even see their views rise until hours or days after posting.

For example, I have 17.9k followers on TikTok, but most of my videos don't take off until overnight when I wake up and check the analytics. On YouTube, however, I can refresh my real-time analytics every couple of minutes to see how many views I've gained in the first few hours. This is a big difference from the platforms where users curate their followers or use paid advertising to get more visibility.

YouTube Shorts: A Different Story

Regarding YouTube Shorts, they don't count against your notifications total, but viewers won't be notified of them. However, they do sometimes show up in the personalized notifications category, which is a mixed blessing. The algorithm behind YouTube Shorts can encourage creators to post more short-form content without sacrificing their notifications.

However, this change has led to a decline in day-one viewership for YouTube Shorts. Many users have stopped using the subfeed on YouTube, and as a result, fewer people are seeing these videos. This highlights the challenges of competing with other platforms like TikTok or Instagram, which prioritize short-form content and mobile-first discovery.

CuriosityStream and Nebula: A Better Option

For those interested in educational content, I recommend checking out CuriosityStream and their partner platform, Nebula. These services offer high-quality, ad-free videos on a wide range of topics, including science, history, and technology.

Nebula features YouTube's top education creators, such as MKBHD, LowSpecGamer, and Thomas Frank. By subscribing to CuriosityStream, you'll get access to their entire library of documentaries and educational content, which includes Nebula for free.

At the moment, CuriosityStream is offering a 26% discount on their annual plan, making it less than $15 per year for both platforms. This is an incredible deal for those who want to explore new topics or learn more about current events.

Head over to CuriosityStream.com/epos to sign up and take advantage of this offer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entransitioning back to planning our show so we know we're making a tech show we know we're making it in this category and we have this content to choose from primarily leveraging here the core umbrella of tech education what are the elements of the show that i want to feature to pick these this is where we think back to all that i was talking about with regards to getting that content up on other platforms that is when you start thinking about this so really think about the platforms that you want to leverage the platforms you already have accounts on similar to putting things on floatplane yes think about the the platforms you like spend a couple weeks actually viewing it filtering results so the algorithms work in your favor figuring out where you want content to go so tick tock instagram twitter youtube vimeo wherever the hell you want your content to go break down where and why so where and why tick tock and then think about what is required for those platforms so tick tock less than or equal to one minute or now three minutes but if you want to make that easily shareable on other platforms you want to keep it less than one or you know one minute or less vertical square videos twitter less than 220 i think it is videos ideally square youtube ideally widescreen any length and then you also have things like podcasts podcasts audio only expectation that it's long you have what else what should we stories just generalized stories on youtube or they're getting rid of fleets on twitter but youtube instagram snapchat whatever and those are like i believe 10 to 15 seconds max and then vertical so this is the where and the formatting that you need for it which can influence how you want to produce the show and then of course you think about the why and i i don't really have anything to write down for this because that's going to be personally you know completely personal up to you are the communities that you want to be a part of on this platform do you already have existing followers on this platform do you have friends on this platform do the viewers that you want to watch your channel exist on this platform so for example a piece of anecdotal evidence that i have encountered that would affect if i was making this particular type of continent is tick tock on tick tock twitch has a huge scene twitch talk is a thing a lot of twitch streamers hop on tick tock and share or look for advice and that is a whole huge vertical on tick tock youtube advice not so much youtube tips tricks news any of that at least anecdotally based on my following and you know hashtag searching and all that youtubers aren't on take talk looking for more information about youtube now the reasoning behind this can be considered fairly straightforward because youtube is a video platform itself so if people are going to look up information or news or talk about youtube they're probably going to do it on youtube because that's the platform to do it meanwhile on twitch while videos are a thing there's no video discovery or public-facing video things like that so if they want to go talk about it they have to go talk about it somewhere else tiktok is a good place to do it it obviously exists on youtube but that's a reason to leverage tick tock for those who want it shorter so you have to think about who are on the different platforms and why you might want your content to be there for example my tech tutorials and reviews don't make sense as an audio only podcast but some of them could make sense as shorter form videos which we'll touch on in a second we've planned out our platforms and why or you know the requirements to put on there now we can decide based on the content we're streaming what makes sense for our content and then we can decide based on a completely subjective and you gotta decide for yourself analysis where and why you would actually want to post so for example i don't really do much with podcasts at the moment i'm hoping to get that started again soon uh but currently i don't have this i don't do stories a whole lot that's something more stories are more suited for photos rather than video clips especially now that short form content is a thing uh so these aren't really yet for me but youtube is obviously my main in the first place and this content will be fed back to youtube so that's upright green twitter will contain excerpts of things as well and in an ideal world i will have some sort of takes or clips that i can cut out to tick-tock and there is a big audience for streamers and twitch related things as well as tech in general not as big but it's on there and so those are the ones that you know as a rough estimate here i might consider for my show but if you're doing more gameplay stuff while there are gameplay edits on tick tock it's a lot harder to really make it appear great because super low quality vertical video and blah blah it's harder it requires more work for you or to just accept that it will be lazy edits but you can do it but twitter and youtube might be best if you're doing like game console modding or something youtube and even pictures for your stories or instagram pictures or instagram little clips might work best if you're doing just a long form talk show podcasts are probably best combined with youtube for that as well and then you can do little excerpts for twitter and tick tock got a lot going on there so we picked out where and why next is to pick your segments so we'll come back up here to our how-to choose platforms where why requirements and then plan segments which are the chunks of the show the big misconception which of course depends entirely on your objectives and the time that you spend streaming but the biggest i think mistake that streamers make even if they're not planning a show but they're just streaming in general involves only having a single thing happen on your stream the the the worst kind of stream unless you are the most entertaining person in the world or you're doing something incredibly unique the worst thing you can do for a stream be it gaming or otherwise is to have a static scene where nothing changes and nothing exciting happens so think about a gameplay stream and if your gameplay stream is just even if you have other scenes but you don't really use them if your gameplay stream is just a facecam in the corner with your gameplay and maybe a chat overlay or something and that's all that's ever really shown unless you have to run to the bathroom that's a pretty boring stream even if your gameplay is great unless you're a top-tier entertainer or doing some crazy unique thing in your gameplay you might want to change that up attention spans are really short you'll notice movies and tv shows are constantly cutting different camera angles and close-ups and making sure there's always action because people tune out really really quickly same thing applies there you want different scenes you want to i think a big thing i pointed out i think it was during our discord uh our discord stage channel yesterday a big thing that i don't think people think about is that if they are getting chat like it's okay to put off chat a little bit if you're focused on gameplay or whatever subject you're talking about right now like me teaching this it's okay to put off chat for a minute here or a few minutes to finish your thought or to finish what you're doing but you have to make sure you come back to your chat or to your sub alerts or to your follower alerts or whatever your secondary interactive element is you have to make sure you come back to it and people don't often do that when they're game streaming they may try to squeeze in a chat interaction between matches but they're still cueing up matches and just rolling through matches one after another without taking a break and frankly in between matches you should be disconnecting and not re-cueing switching to a just chatting scene or something else happening and interacting with your chat for a few minutes to give them that break and to give them that interactive time and to reduce the dead air that happens during your gameplay and then go back into the game and frankly that break from the game if you're losing or getting tilted will actually help you stay positive and more enjoyable to watch in your stream anyway in the first place that's really powerful should frequency or schedule determine when or why also like tick tock requires a ton of uploads whereas youtube hurts if you post more often yes that includes in the requirements so requirements length format frequency i'll just say audio visual for now so frequency is a big deal i have seen a lot of tick tocks where so just just as a note on most platforms and i realized the incredible contradiction i'm creating right now but on most platforms that are short and mobile oriented the channels that are gurus on how to grow really quickly on those platforms are usually making up a lot of their tips and the same applies to twitch talk i am calling those out all the time on on my own tick tock tick tock.com at eposvox by the way uh but they are making up about half of what they say i'm making that up number myself that's how made up this all is i'm making that number up myself but they are making up a ton of their tips and some of those tips include how often you actually have to post there are generally no rules for that now people can actually study especially people who have access to like aggregate channel data they can study and find out how that affects things uh but they don't necessarily have the be-all end-all answer and then there's made up tips like on there was a bunch going around for tick tock and instagram saying you have to interact with x number of posts in order for people to find yours that's not it that's them wanting you to interact with their posts to boost their channel no platform on earth cares if you're interacting with other people in order to promote your content because a viewer isn't measuring that when they go watch you so with youtube specifically just as a little nugget of information you get three video notifications going live per 24 hours and one community post so within a 24 hour span if you post more than three videos you do not have notifications sent out to viewers now you have the chance of alternating notifications for viewers who have personalized notifications instead of all notifications they may only get you know they may not get one of your videos because youtube doesn't think they'll click on it but they may get the one that no one else is getting but ultimately in terms of the push notifications which is what the culture relies on at the moment i hate it i disable all push notifications but you only get three for 24 hours so if you plan on posting a ton of content just posting it to youtube may not work if you're planning on posting a bunch to youtube because eventually your viewers have stopped seeing it and if they're not clicking on it then youtube stopped promoting and get as much and blah blah speaking of youtube notifications as i just mentioned you only get so many per day to upload these videos which is why i have to space these parts out if you're looking for the full picture plus tons more information that i dropped during this whole talk that didn't make it into the full cuts of these videos the entire extended cut of this whole talk is actually already available on my own streaming site my videos are higher quality they are ad free and often extended from the youtube version like this one the site is called nebula and we've partnered with curiosity stream nebula features youtube's top education creators such as mkbhd lowspecgamer and thomasfrank curiositystream saw what we were doing for educational content and wanted to partner up we've worked out a deal where if you sign up with the link below you not only get access to curiosity stream in their library of thousands of documentary and educational content where you get access to nebula for free for the entire duration of your subscription to curiosity stream for a limited time curiosity stream is offering a 26 off deal off of their annual plan making it less than 15 per year for both curiosity stream and nebula while you're there check out becoming martian to learn about how we need to evolve how we live also how we exist in order to live on mars in the future which seems to be something that people want to do now head on over to curiositystream.com epos for the best deal in streaming sign up today this doesn't affect the subscriptions feed but it does affect your push notifications and you only get one of those community post tab posts so if you want somewhere you can post really frequently the more mobile oriented platforms where they want as much content as platform as possible like tw tick tock or instagram or twitter it's kind of even good to go there tick tock is a platform where you could probably never post too much because they're always trying to like push more and more content and frankly most of your content you're unlike youtube so youtube this is a complete tangent but i want the information out there since someone might ask with youtube a lot of your viewership is kind of heavily influenced by who watches in the first few hours now youtube's algorithms and systems and search and discovery system will eventually figure out who is supposed to watch your video long term but if you get a ton of videos really quickly with or a ton of views sorry really quickly within the first few hours that gives youtube a ton of information to properly promote your videos better and show that it's performing well or not performing well whereas on a platform like tick tock half the time if you post this tick tock video you may not see views for hours because people aren't just like pulling up their tick tock follower feed and going and watching that some people heavily curate their followers but a lot of people and especially you know randoms that are going to find you are just in their for you page so most of my tick tocks even i'm sitting at 17.9 k followers right now which is sounds big but isn't for tick tock most of my videos don't even take off until like overnight like i'll post it go to bed and i'll wake up and it has an actual view count whereas on youtube i am refreshing my real-time analytics like every couple minutes for the first few hours so there's a big difference there as well does notifications apply to youtube shorts as well so they no longer push so the short answer is no both in the sense that they don't count against your notifications total but also viewers won't be notified of them which is kind of a double-edged sword they do still sometimes show up in the personalized notifications category but not the all notifications category and they did this to try to encourage creators to post a lot more shorts without feeling like they're sacrificing their notifications so it's kind of a win but also you're gonna see less viewership on them these days as a result at least in terms of day one viewership because not a lot of people use the subfeed on youtube anymore either that's the where and why the platforms that you want your content to be ontransitioning back to planning our show so we know we're making a tech show we know we're making it in this category and we have this content to choose from primarily leveraging here the core umbrella of tech education what are the elements of the show that i want to feature to pick these this is where we think back to all that i was talking about with regards to getting that content up on other platforms that is when you start thinking about this so really think about the platforms that you want to leverage the platforms you already have accounts on similar to putting things on floatplane yes think about the the platforms you like spend a couple weeks actually viewing it filtering results so the algorithms work in your favor figuring out where you want content to go so tick tock instagram twitter youtube vimeo wherever the hell you want your content to go break down where and why so where and why tick tock and then think about what is required for those platforms so tick tock less than or equal to one minute or now three minutes but if you want to make that easily shareable on other platforms you want to keep it less than one or you know one minute or less vertical square videos twitter less than 220 i think it is videos ideally square youtube ideally widescreen any length and then you also have things like podcasts podcasts audio only expectation that it's long you have what else what should we stories just generalized stories on youtube or they're getting rid of fleets on twitter but youtube instagram snapchat whatever and those are like i believe 10 to 15 seconds max and then vertical so this is the where and the formatting that you need for it which can influence how you want to produce the show and then of course you think about the why and i i don't really have anything to write down for this because that's going to be personally you know completely personal up to you are the communities that you want to be a part of on this platform do you already have existing followers on this platform do you have friends on this platform do the viewers that you want to watch your channel exist on this platform so for example a piece of anecdotal evidence that i have encountered that would affect if i was making this particular type of continent is tick tock on tick tock twitch has a huge scene twitch talk is a thing a lot of twitch streamers hop on tick tock and share or look for advice and that is a whole huge vertical on tick tock youtube advice not so much youtube tips tricks news any of that at least anecdotally based on my following and you know hashtag searching and all that youtubers aren't on take talk looking for more information about youtube now the reasoning behind this can be considered fairly straightforward because youtube is a video platform itself so if people are going to look up information or news or talk about youtube they're probably going to do it on youtube because that's the platform to do it meanwhile on twitch while videos are a thing there's no video discovery or public-facing video things like that so if they want to go talk about it they have to go talk about it somewhere else tiktok is a good place to do it it obviously exists on youtube but that's a reason to leverage tick tock for those who want it shorter so you have to think about who are on the different platforms and why you might want your content to be there for example my tech tutorials and reviews don't make sense as an audio only podcast but some of them could make sense as shorter form videos which we'll touch on in a second we've planned out our platforms and why or you know the requirements to put on there now we can decide based on the content we're streaming what makes sense for our content and then we can decide based on a completely subjective and you gotta decide for yourself analysis where and why you would actually want to post so for example i don't really do much with podcasts at the moment i'm hoping to get that started again soon uh but currently i don't have this i don't do stories a whole lot that's something more stories are more suited for photos rather than video clips especially now that short form content is a thing uh so these aren't really yet for me but youtube is obviously my main in the first place and this content will be fed back to youtube so that's upright green twitter will contain excerpts of things as well and in an ideal world i will have some sort of takes or clips that i can cut out to tick-tock and there is a big audience for streamers and twitch related things as well as tech in general not as big but it's on there and so those are the ones that you know as a rough estimate here i might consider for my show but if you're doing more gameplay stuff while there are gameplay edits on tick tock it's a lot harder to really make it appear great because super low quality vertical video and blah blah it's harder it requires more work for you or to just accept that it will be lazy edits but you can do it but twitter and youtube might be best if you're doing like game console modding or something youtube and even pictures for your stories or instagram pictures or instagram little clips might work best if you're doing just a long form talk show podcasts are probably best combined with youtube for that as well and then you can do little excerpts for twitter and tick tock got a lot going on there so we picked out where and why next is to pick your segments so we'll come back up here to our how-to choose platforms where why requirements and then plan segments which are the chunks of the show the big misconception which of course depends entirely on your objectives and the time that you spend streaming but the biggest i think mistake that streamers make even if they're not planning a show but they're just streaming in general involves only having a single thing happen on your stream the the the worst kind of stream unless you are the most entertaining person in the world or you're doing something incredibly unique the worst thing you can do for a stream be it gaming or otherwise is to have a static scene where nothing changes and nothing exciting happens so think about a gameplay stream and if your gameplay stream is just even if you have other scenes but you don't really use them if your gameplay stream is just a facecam in the corner with your gameplay and maybe a chat overlay or something and that's all that's ever really shown unless you have to run to the bathroom that's a pretty boring stream even if your gameplay is great unless you're a top-tier entertainer or doing some crazy unique thing in your gameplay you might want to change that up attention spans are really short you'll notice movies and tv shows are constantly cutting different camera angles and close-ups and making sure there's always action because people tune out really really quickly same thing applies there you want different scenes you want to i think a big thing i pointed out i think it was during our discord uh our discord stage channel yesterday a big thing that i don't think people think about is that if they are getting chat like it's okay to put off chat a little bit if you're focused on gameplay or whatever subject you're talking about right now like me teaching this it's okay to put off chat for a minute here or a few minutes to finish your thought or to finish what you're doing but you have to make sure you come back to your chat or to your sub alerts or to your follower alerts or whatever your secondary interactive element is you have to make sure you come back to it and people don't often do that when they're game streaming they may try to squeeze in a chat interaction between matches but they're still cueing up matches and just rolling through matches one after another without taking a break and frankly in between matches you should be disconnecting and not re-cueing switching to a just chatting scene or something else happening and interacting with your chat for a few minutes to give them that break and to give them that interactive time and to reduce the dead air that happens during your gameplay and then go back into the game and frankly that break from the game if you're losing or getting tilted will actually help you stay positive and more enjoyable to watch in your stream anyway in the first place that's really powerful should frequency or schedule determine when or why also like tick tock requires a ton of uploads whereas youtube hurts if you post more often yes that includes in the requirements so requirements length format frequency i'll just say audio visual for now so frequency is a big deal i have seen a lot of tick tocks where so just just as a note on most platforms and i realized the incredible contradiction i'm creating right now but on most platforms that are short and mobile oriented the channels that are gurus on how to grow really quickly on those platforms are usually making up a lot of their tips and the same applies to twitch talk i am calling those out all the time on on my own tick tock tick tock.com at eposvox by the way uh but they are making up about half of what they say i'm making that up number myself that's how made up this all is i'm making that number up myself but they are making up a ton of their tips and some of those tips include how often you actually have to post there are generally no rules for that now people can actually study especially people who have access to like aggregate channel data they can study and find out how that affects things uh but they don't necessarily have the be-all end-all answer and then there's made up tips like on there was a bunch going around for tick tock and instagram saying you have to interact with x number of posts in order for people to find yours that's not it that's them wanting you to interact with their posts to boost their channel no platform on earth cares if you're interacting with other people in order to promote your content because a viewer isn't measuring that when they go watch you so with youtube specifically just as a little nugget of information you get three video notifications going live per 24 hours and one community post so within a 24 hour span if you post more than three videos you do not have notifications sent out to viewers now you have the chance of alternating notifications for viewers who have personalized notifications instead of all notifications they may only get you know they may not get one of your videos because youtube doesn't think they'll click on it but they may get the one that no one else is getting but ultimately in terms of the push notifications which is what the culture relies on at the moment i hate it i disable all push notifications but you only get three for 24 hours so if you plan on posting a ton of content just posting it to youtube may not work if you're planning on posting a bunch to youtube because eventually your viewers have stopped seeing it and if they're not clicking on it then youtube stopped promoting and get as much and blah blah speaking of youtube notifications as i just mentioned you only get so many per day to upload these videos which is why i have to space these parts out if you're looking for the full picture plus tons more information that i dropped during this whole talk that didn't make it into the full cuts of these videos the entire extended cut of this whole talk is actually already available on my own streaming site my videos are higher quality they are ad free and often extended from the youtube version like this one the site is called nebula and we've partnered with curiosity stream nebula features youtube's top education creators such as mkbhd lowspecgamer and thomasfrank curiositystream saw what we were doing for educational content and wanted to partner up we've worked out a deal where if you sign up with the link below you not only get access to curiosity stream in their library of thousands of documentary and educational content where you get access to nebula for free for the entire duration of your subscription to curiosity stream for a limited time curiosity stream is offering a 26 off deal off of their annual plan making it less than 15 per year for both curiosity stream and nebula while you're there check out becoming martian to learn about how we need to evolve how we live also how we exist in order to live on mars in the future which seems to be something that people want to do now head on over to curiositystream.com epos for the best deal in streaming sign up today this doesn't affect the subscriptions feed but it does affect your push notifications and you only get one of those community post tab posts so if you want somewhere you can post really frequently the more mobile oriented platforms where they want as much content as platform as possible like tw tick tock or instagram or twitter it's kind of even good to go there tick tock is a platform where you could probably never post too much because they're always trying to like push more and more content and frankly most of your content you're unlike youtube so youtube this is a complete tangent but i want the information out there since someone might ask with youtube a lot of your viewership is kind of heavily influenced by who watches in the first few hours now youtube's algorithms and systems and search and discovery system will eventually figure out who is supposed to watch your video long term but if you get a ton of videos really quickly with or a ton of views sorry really quickly within the first few hours that gives youtube a ton of information to properly promote your videos better and show that it's performing well or not performing well whereas on a platform like tick tock half the time if you post this tick tock video you may not see views for hours because people aren't just like pulling up their tick tock follower feed and going and watching that some people heavily curate their followers but a lot of people and especially you know randoms that are going to find you are just in their for you page so most of my tick tocks even i'm sitting at 17.9 k followers right now which is sounds big but isn't for tick tock most of my videos don't even take off until like overnight like i'll post it go to bed and i'll wake up and it has an actual view count whereas on youtube i am refreshing my real-time analytics like every couple minutes for the first few hours so there's a big difference there as well does notifications apply to youtube shorts as well so they no longer push so the short answer is no both in the sense that they don't count against your notifications total but also viewers won't be notified of them which is kind of a double-edged sword they do still sometimes show up in the personalized notifications category but not the all notifications category and they did this to try to encourage creators to post a lot more shorts without feeling like they're sacrificing their notifications so it's kind of a win but also you're gonna see less viewership on them these days as a result at least in terms of day one viewership because not a lot of people use the subfeed on youtube anymore either that's the where and why the platforms that you want your content to be on\n"