YouTube has announced a major change today related to being able to automatically share YouTube activity on Twitter and other social platforms. The Google-owned service announced that after this month users won’t be able to share YouTube activity on some social platforms.
Removes ability to automatically share YouTube Activity
The ability to share YouTube Activity has been available to YouTube users for years now. The feature allowed users to share their activity to their linked social media accounts without visiting the other platform or using any third-party service. It was undoubtedly a useful feature, but now, YouTube is killing it.
Specifically, users now won’t be able to share YouTube activity on Twitter and Google + after January 31st. The update was announced in a post by a Team YouTube member. Removal of the sharing feature won’t affect other features, like sharing from the video page or adding social media links to the channel banner.
YouTube gave no clear reason why it is removing this functionality to share YouTube activity on Twitter. But it did say that “we’ve found that social sharing works better when the message is more customized and takes advantage of social media features, such as @mentions. Overall, this provides a better experience for both you and your followers vs automatically generated posts.”
The Google-owned company has removed many features recently, but they were removed mainly due to minimal usage. However, the decision to remove the sharing feature comes as a surprise considering it is being used by a large number of creators. Creators usually upload and schedule videos in bulk. Also, setting up automatic posts to the social media platforms help creators save some time.
YouTube is instead asking users to share videos on the social platforms directly from YouTube using the Share button. This option will be available after a video is successfully uploaded. Also, the option in the YouTube Settings > Connected apps > “Share your public activity to Twitter” is being removed.
“This only affects sharing of public activity going forward, items already shared will remain on Twitter… You’ll also no longer see the option to automatically share your video on Google+ and Twitter via the upload flow in Creator Studio,” YouTube says.
YouTube clearing spam accounts
YouTube recently also removed spam subscriptions. Before it started the spam subscription removal process, the video streaming site warned that users may see some drop in their subscription count.
Further, the Google-owned company noted that channels whose subscribers fall below 1,000 after the spam removal process would no longer qualify for YPP, and thus, would be removed from the program.
According to YouTube’s Community Guidelines enforcement report, the platform removed about 7.85 million videos and 1.67 million channels between July and September. It must be noted that because of the 1.67 million channels removed, about 50.2 million videos also disappeared.
YouTube removes a channel if it gets three strikes in three months, or a channel violates its policies, such as showing blocked content. YouTube removed one high-profile account in August, deleting the channel of Alex Jones, who is a right-wing conspiracy theorist and InfoWars radio host.
According to YouTube, about 80% of the videos it removed violated its policies on spam and misleading content, while about 13% were removed for showing nudity or sexual content. Only about 1% of the channels were removed for promoting violence, hateful or abusive content.
Rolling out new features
Separately, YouTube has been rolling out new features continuously to ensure that users don’t lose interest in the platform. A couple of months back, the video streaming platform came up with an Instagram-like Stories feature. The feature is available to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers.
YouTube’s Stories, however, is different from Instagram Stories in a few ways. YouTube Stories vanish after seven days on the mobile app, are visible to both subscribers and non-subscribers, and show up in YouTube’s “Up Next” sidebar.
Further, creators using the feature are allowed to reply to the fans who interact with the stories. Moreover, the response from the creator will be visible to all who come across the story. Fans can leave comments or ask questions, while creators can publicly address these responses.
With the Stories feature, the Google-owned company aims to encourage community engagement. Creators can put behind-the-scenes clips of their videos, or promote upcoming videos, thus encouraging a response from the viewers.
