The subscribe button is there to take advantage of your cognitive and motivational structure and keep you “engaged” with YouTube. Having subscriptions gives you a “reason” to return to Youtube on a regular basis, and gives Youtube an excuse to send you “reminders” about content in your subscribed channels.
Your subscriptions may also help Youtube to feed you content that keeps you there once you show up, although Youtube has access to other, often more effective ways of doing that, and having to “honor” subscriptions may actually interefere with those, so I don’t think it really counts.
Anyway, the bottom line is that, if you are like most people, subscriptions will contribute to you spending more time on Youtube than you “should”, in the sense that your Youtube time will interfere with goals that you would, if asked, say were more important. The intent is to have “watching Youtube” be an activity in itself, rather than having Youtube be a tool that you use to get information relevant to some outside purpose.
The subscription system is also used to motivate people to give content to Youtube. Although some mega-channels make economic sense, the “gamification” of subscription numbers helps to motivate marginal creators to spend more time and effort than they can really afford.
Subscriptions may occasionally help to meet a “user goal” like learning or staying informed about a specific topic… but their design and usual effect is to advance the “Youtube goal” of keeping the user staring at, or possibly producing, Youtube content and advertising, more than the user otherwise would and regardless of the user’s own interests (in any sense of the word “interests”...).
Some people will say that the trap has to do with tracking your activities, but that’s basically not true. Subscriptions don’t track you any more than just visiting any major Web site will track you. It’s more about controlling your activities. Your subscriptions do help a little with analyzing you as an advertising target, but I don’t think that’s a really major purpose or effect.
The subscribe button is there to take advantage of your cognitive and motivational structure and keep you “engaged” with YouTube. Having subscriptions gives you a “reason” to return to Youtube on a regular basis, and gives Youtube an excuse to send you “reminders” about content in your subscribed channels.
Your subscriptions may also help Youtube to feed you content that keeps you there once you show up, although Youtube has access to other, often more effective ways of doing that, and having to “honor” subscriptions may actually interefere with those, so I don’t think it really counts.
Anyway, the bottom line is that, if you are like most people, subscriptions will contribute to you spending more time on Youtube than you “should”, in the sense that your Youtube time will interfere with goals that you would, if asked, say were more important. The intent is to have “watching Youtube” be an activity in itself, rather than having Youtube be a tool that you use to get information relevant to some outside purpose.
The subscription system is also used to motivate people to give content to Youtube. Although some mega-channels make economic sense, the “gamification” of subscription numbers helps to motivate marginal creators to spend more time and effort than they can really afford.
Subscriptions may occasionally help to meet a “user goal” like learning or staying informed about a specific topic… but their design and usual effect is to advance the “Youtube goal” of keeping the user staring at, or possibly producing, Youtube content and advertising, more than the user otherwise would and regardless of the user’s own interests (in any sense of the word “interests”...).
Some people will say that the trap has to do with tracking your activities, but that’s basically not true. Subscriptions don’t track you any more than just visiting any major Web site will track you. It’s more about controlling your activities. Your subscriptions do help a little with analyzing you as an advertising target, but I don’t think that’s a really major purpose or effect.
I appreciate that you took the time to explain your position. I think this is indeed a difference in the definition of “trap”, so I’ll leave it here.