If you are reading this, you probably already know YouTube recently removed
the Collections feature that allowed you to group your YouTube
subscriptions into "folders" with other subscriptions of
the same nature. I can only speculate as to why they might have done
this, but I think it is probably purely due to what they see as
cost-effectiveness. I think they probably found a very small
percentage of YouTube users actually bothered with this feature, so
they decided to discontinue it and dedicate more of their resources
to features most people actually do use.
But,
I could be wrong, and YouTube as far as I know has never given an
official straight answer to this. Their site merely says "The
Collections feature was removed on May 26, 2015. We'll continue to
focus on other efforts to make your subscriptions even more
enjoyable."
I have to wonder if they even saw the irony in this unhelpful
statement. ". . .even more enjoyable" indeed.
Those
of us who relied on this feature are now left with out subscriptions
in complete disarray, and while there are other off-site services
that offer ways to organize our YouTube subscriptions, I for one
don't want to have to use them. I have seen many complaints that they
don't actually work, and who can say how long they will be around, or
how well they will be maintained vis-a-vis YouTube's constantly
changing UI?
So
what are we to do? Well, the simplest solution for me was to create a
"YouTube" folder in my bookmarks (I put mine up top in my
Toolbar) and then to add sub-folders named for my collection
categories. After that, all that was required was to go into "Manage
Subscriptions" from my main subscriptions feed page, and one by
one open each channel, bookmark it, and put the bookmark in the
appropriate folder.
This
may seem a lot of work if you have a lot of subscriptions, (I have
173 as of this writing) but it is something that need only be done
once, and once done is far easier to maintain and update than the
Collections feature ever was; I always found the feature to be more
than a little kludgey; far more of a pain than it seemed it really
needed to be. Also, for navigation, bookmarks are much easier and
readily accessible than the old Collections sidebar ever was. I often
found scrolling through it and actually finding what I was looking
for rather difficult, especially when my mouse strayed just that
little bit and the whole damned thing closed on me. In retrospect,
I'm actually kind of glad YouTube did this; I'm much happier with my
new arrangement.
