It's time for a little rant
Am I the only one that is tired of YouTube jacking with things just to make life harder for those that try to create quality content? I know I have been MIA for a while on youtube, but that doesn't mean that I have walked completely away from it. During my time on the road when I was not able to make videos they decided to 'soft' roll out what is called YouTube Studio which is a bloated, hard to navigate version of a very good dashboard that they had just rolled out less than a year prior. The old dashboard was just that, it was old. They did an update to it and the new dashboard was awesome. Very clean, fast and easy to use. But then mid 2018 they rolled out Studio....
Studio is absolutely horrible IMO. It used to be when you clicked on the title of the video on your dashboard, it would take you to the edit page so you could edit the information on the video. If you clicked on the thumbnail of the video, it would play the video. The same goes with right clicking each one respectively and getting the links. Yes, the title of the video has bit me a few times by posting the edit URL rather than the watch URL lol. But still, it was easy to use.
Now, Studio has both the thumbnail and the title text linked to the edit page. I did some searching today, adn there is a 64x38 pixel image of a black play button that is used to actually watch or link a video. Very small on a very cluttered page. And, I use TubeBuddy (not really use, but it is on there) and that may be where that little watch icon is coming from, I'm not sure. All of that to say, linking videos just got a lot harder with the new YT Studio.
Next up (I'm not done talking about Studio, but I will save you all the rest of the rant for 'this' post lol) is YouTube "cleaning house". On 12-12-18 they decided to clean house and remove subscriptions. Some of these were closed accounts and that's fine, they have done that for years. Someone closes their account or gets removed because of a TOS violation you lose them as a subscriber. But this time, in their words, they removed what they thought where spammers or sub4sub accounts from your subscriptions.
I want to get one thing straight real quick. On EVERY CHANNEL I OWN I have NEVER done a sub4sub, I have never paid for subs I have never even looked into it. ALL of my subscriptions on ALL of my channels are legit subs. But every friggin' one of my channels has taken a hit including RCH, BrokeAuto and Z28. You look at the analytic data and I have a nice little line of subs that is very fluid and then on the 12th, it just TANKS, and then on the 13th on, it goes back to normal. All because they decided to "clean house" on what they "thought" were spammer subscriptions.
If they were actually spammers, that's fine. I don't want them there. But I highly doubt a channel as small as Z28 would have the exact same number of subscriptions lost as the RCH channel, and they are EXACTLY the same number lost on that day.
This "Studio" crap though is going to drive me insane. As I was typing this, I loaded up the BA page from the Z28 page just to verify (and BA lost 19 subs on that same day btw) and the first page was the old style dashboard. I went from the Z28 old dashboard (after clicking the little link to go from Studio to the old style) and when I went to the BA page it was still the old style. I clicked on the analytics tab on the left and BOOM, Studio analytics which is all but unusable. So I had to yet again click that damn link to go back to the "classic" version (if they were into cars, they would know the "classic" is ALWAYS better than the "modern") which takes forever because you have to answer a popup as to why you want to go back to classic. I have worn out my keyboard typing into that box multiple times on multiple channels but now, I just click the crap out of the button and it will eventually change over without putting anything in there.
I know a little smuck like myself is not going to do anything to change the minds of a company as large as YouTube, but something has to give. I was able to go into my channels and do what I needed and knew exactly where to go and it loaded fast. Now, they are stacking these options that I use all the time behind other options where you can't find them and because it is so bloated now, it takes forever for a page to load. Time is money, and when it takes 5x as long to do something, the same thing, that I used to do, it is absolutely unacceptable. I may start looking into moving over to another platform, but lets face it, there is nothing else out there that can compete with the audience that YT provides... Too bad they are taking advantage of this fact though....
/rant
