Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do? And apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched. If creators were distributed across different platforms, this wouldn't work.
> Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do?
Use an app that can listen to podcasts? Uh... yeah.
> apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched
So you're just going to ignore the context and pretend that you're saying something insightful? The comment you're responding to specifically pointed out that the original commenter doesn't cite YouTube's recommendation engine as the source of value for him/her.
Could do? Yes, it's as easy as adding a contact to your phone. Wants to do? I'm sure some do and some don't, but I'd argue that there's conditioning involved there by these services so that is irrelevant.
I can think of a simple engineering solution to the problem of recommendations, an open API standard to fetch them should a user want that functionality. So it could work, but the hosts don't want it to work.
But that aside, just because a service makes recommendations doesn't mean the recommendation engine is more useful than randomly finding things or getting sent things by friends. I'd argue that YouTube recommendations, at least in their current iteration, are less useful to users than their friend sending them a video they were subscribed to, following random twitter accounts that share content they enjoy, or even a chronological list of uploads sorted with content tags. You're placing a lot of value on something that frankly is a raging dumpster fire of hot garbage.
