Another thing of note in YouTube’s never ending “let’s try things, then change those things, then remove those things a few years later” pattern over the past decade is the removal of automatic post sharing.
Strictly in this case sharing to Twitter and Google+ (which quite honestly I think were the only two options left) was removed on January 31st.
YouTube’s reason? They feel that these sharing features would work better of done manually, that it ” works better when the message is more customized and takes advantage of social media features, such as @mentions.”
Okay. That’s… well it’s a reason. Why remove the feature to let it be automated though? Facebook (which was removed a while ago from auto sharing) Twitter and Google+ all share links and use hashtags, which are all that really matters for such sharing content over social media, so “custom” posts for each platform seem needless for most users.
If I’m posting something, and I want to include an @ mention, guess what? I’m going to add the @ mention in there. I don’t care if it doesn’t work on Google+ because, well, I just don’t on a whole, but also you’re closing Google+ in a few months so in the long run it’s meaningless now to even care about posts to the service.
Perhaps that’s the actual reason — the closure of Google+. I say this because that would have left Twitter as the only social sharing service that YouTube had available, which would be fine but would seem a little limited. The fact that automatic Facebook sharing was removed at some time in the past already took out one of the major players in the social media game, and already made the feature seem a little, well, meh.
Of course you can still manually share and customize, but some people (like me) generally prefer automated features like this to help speed our workflow, get the video out there, and at a later time go back and share the content again with a more customized message for each social media platform.
Ah well, Google knows best, right? That joke being made, services “like If This Then That” ( https://ifttt.com/ ) allows you to set up custom scripts for all kinds of website actions, including sharing YouTube uploads to other social media accounts. Awesome! I’ve used it before, and it works pretty well most of the time, sometimes missing the mark, but otherwise working fine for most every share I’ve tried it with (namely Instagram post sharing back when I was on Windows phone!)
All in all, this doesn’t bother me too much. It’s more of an annoyance than anything else, but much like annotations it’s something they had no need to remove, and their “reason” feels like an excuse, a desperate grasp
Yep, yet another thing that really didn’t need to be retired. While custom messages do work better for bringing in viewers some people don’t have the time or in some cases can’t manually share at peak times because they are either busy or not awake then.