YouTube has insisted that it isn’t unsubscribing its users from channels, saying that it has investigated “over 100” different cases and hasn’t uncovered a glitch thus far.
Despite there being over 1 billion unique users who visit the site each month, the YouTube Help channel cited a very small number of accounts that it had used in its research to determine that there wasn’t an issue with subscriptions. Although users frequently complain of being randomly unsubscribed from various channels, and content creators have also stated that they’ve received emails from fans informing them of this issue, YouTube has claimed that no such issue exists.
The video, which has now been disliked over 81,000 times, sees two of the site’s employees address concerns regarding the random unsubscriptions plaguing the site, with product manager Zindzi saying: “We’ve heard these reports and we take this feedback so seriously. YouTube doesn’t unsubscribe people from channels — subscribing is a core part of the YouTube experience, and that’s really the mission of our whole team, to make that experience better. We’ve actually looked at over 100 individual cases, and so far we haven’t been able to find any underlying glitch.”
Despite this claim, YouTube users are unconvinced. As a result the video has received one of the overwhelmingly negative like/dislike ratios in the site’s history, with commenters pointing out how the test pool for the site’s research wasn’t nearly large enough for it to conclude that users aren’t being randomly unsubscribed from their favorite channels.
Some of the site’s most subscribed YouTubers have taken to frequently reminding their viewers to check their subscription feeds to see if their videos are still appearing, noting this apparent issue as a major cause for concern. Content creators such as PewDiePie, who has over 50 million subscribers on the platform, have pointed to the problem as a reason behind their declining number of views, suggesting that their videos aren’t appearing for their followers. YouTube has encouraged anyone who has experienced this issue to file a report with the site.
