An Open Letter to YouTube: Let Me Organize My Own Subscriptions

To the Product Team at YouTube (a division of Google, who clearly has the engineering resources to figure this out),

I need to talk to you about something that has been quietly driving me up the wall for years now — something so simple, so obvious, and so clearly needed that I keep waiting for it to just... appear. And yet, here we are.

I have over 75 subscriptions on YouTube.

Seventy. Five. Plus.

I subscribe to channels about tech reviews, cooking, automotive repair, accessibility, programming, construction, travel, and food culture. I am, to put it plainly, a person with varied interests who has found incredible creators across a wide range of topics — and I have given each of them the courtesy of a subscription. I showed up. I hit the button. I said, yes, I want more of this in my life.

And YouTube's response to my loyalty and curiosity? A single, endlessly scrolling list of every channel I've ever subscribed to, sorted in an order that seems to be loosely based on chaos theory.

The Problem in Plain Terms

Here's the scenario I keep finding myself in: It's a Sunday afternoon. I just got back from a long week, and I want to unwind by watching some cooking videos — maybe a recipe breakdown, maybe someone doing a deep-dive on regional cuisine. I don't want tech news right now. I don't want a programming tutorial. I definitely don't want a three-hour automotive deep-dive on suspension geometry (as much as I love that content on the right day). I just want cooking.

But there is no way for me to say that to YouTube. There's no folder. No tag. No category. No filter. I can search, sure — but searching defeats the entire purpose of subscribing in the first place. I subscribed so I wouldn't have to search. I subscribed so that when I'm in the mood for something, the work of finding the right channel is already done.

Instead, I get "Subscriptions" — one big pile of everything, all at once, all the time.

To Be Fair

I want to be fair here. I know YouTube has introduced some features over the years. I've seen the little "Collections" workaround that some users have pieced together. I know you can use playlists for saved videos. But I'm not talking about saved videos. I'm talking about the channels themselves — the creators I follow — being organizable in a meaningful way at the subscription level.

Imagine if I could create a "Weekend Cooking" group, drop my 10 favorite food and cooking channels in there, and when I'm in the mood, just click that group and see a feed of only their recent uploads. Or a "Learning Mode" group for my programming and construction channels when I'm ready to focus. Or a "Car Stuff" bucket for automotive repair channels that I want on a rainy Saturday in the garage.

This isn't a radical idea. This is basic information architecture. This is how humans organize anything in their lives — by category, by context, by mood.

I Know You Can Do This

I know you have the engineering talent at Google to build this. I know because you've built recommendation algorithms of mind-bending complexity. You've built real-time live-stream infrastructure for millions of simultaneous viewers. You've built automatic captioning and translation for accessibility across dozens of languages — which, by the way, is genuinely impressive and important work. So I have a hard time believing that "let users put channels into named folders" is somehow beyond reach.

What I think is probably happening is that it's not a priority. And I get it — there are a thousand competing priorities, a thousand metrics, a thousand things the business needs. But I'd invite you to consider what it means for user trust and long-term engagement when people with 75+ subscriptions — your most engaged viewers, the ones who have leaned all the way in — feel like the platform doesn't actually support how they watch.

The Ask

I'm not going anywhere. I love too many creators on this platform to leave. But I'm asking you, sincerely and with full acknowledgment of your engineering talent: please give us a way to organize our subscriptions by category.

I just want to watch some cooking videos on a Sunday afternoon without feeling like I'm digging through a junk drawer.

Respectfully (and a little bit exasperated),

Marcus
A loyal YouTube user with 75+ subscriptions and absolutely nowhere to put them