YouTube is a wonderful outlet for anyone with a video camera and some basic editing skills. Having been a part of it for as many years as I have, I have seen some very good videos and some very bad ones as well. Separating the good from the bad channels can be a problem all it's own.
Part of the problem has to do with the balance of friendship and boredom. As an example, consider the days of old when you had friends who would make home movies or take vacations pictures and invite you over to view them. Very few of these were hardly worth watching, mostly because your friend's idea of things that are interesting would not match your own. But as a friend you felt obligated to sit through them no matter how boring they were.
Fast forward to the present where we have YouTube. Now we have the ability to pick and choose what we watch or don't watch. Whatever your interests are, there is more than likely a video or channel dedicated to that subject. Great! What could possibly go wrong with that? Let's take a look.
Over the years that YouTube has been around, a lot of folks have gotten the bug to make their own videos and post them on their channel. No problem there, watch or don't watch, the decision is yous. But here is where the problem begins.
Say you begin to have a following. Not much at first, but your subscriber base grows. Like it or not, you feel obligated to return the favor and subscribe to their channel. You figure if they like what you are posting, surely their tastes must be similar. As long as that is the case, there is not much of a problem, but here is the rub. Maybe they subscribed at the request of someone else and are just doing it out of loyalty to a friend. Oops! Now we have a problem.
And the problem gets worse the more subscribers you get. You don't want to be a snob so you hit the subscribe button on their channel and so it goes until you are subscribed to so many people who post videos you care nothing about that you simply can't keep up watching them all in a day and so you just don't watch any!
I think everyone needs to find their own solution, but what I did was to politely explain to some of the people I subbed to that I might not watch all of their videos because the content didn't interest me. I think most reasonable people understand that.
I also tend to skip through videos that I have little interest in. You can still comment just by looking at the comments made so far and from the parts you watch. It may not be totally fair, but when you get so far behind it's almost mandatory.
I've also found that people I once found very interesting are no long interesting or post videos that are boring. Those I may just click on and then go directly to the end so that YouTube will mark it watched. I hate seeing videos in my subscriptions that are not marked watched.
And finally I've gone through my subscriptions and unsubscribed to those I don't enjoy at all. Life is too short to waste watching videos I am not interested in at all. To be fair, if anyone doesn't want to stay subbed to me because of that I completely understand.
I would be most interested in your method to cope with this problem. :)
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