Infrapink (he/his/him)
Infrapink (he/his/him)  ·  last month
One thing @pluralistic doesn't mention in his enthusiastic promotion of #RSS is that every #YouTube channel also has its own RSS feed. On desktop, press Ctrl+u to view the source and then search for /feeds/ .Copy the URI into your RSS reader and voilà! No need to rely on YouTube's terrible notification system; you get notified of each new video when it's posted, and the site can't put any obstacles in your way as they love to do.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/

Dan Q
Dan Q  ·  last month
@Infrapink @pluralistic This is how I watch close to 100% of YouTube content, right through my feed reader. I even wrote a blog post about it, five or so years ago: https://danq.me/youtube

I have only two pet peeves., and they're relatively minor:

1. YouTube doesn't include enough metadata in the feed for me to filter out "shorts" (for some channels, I don't want the shorts)

2. Premieres appear in my feed reader when the video is announced, not when it goes live. So for a video I'd like to see, I have to either keep it in my feed reader "for later" (which feels untidy), or else mark it as read and remember to check back (which undermines the point of the feed reader).

Still way better than using YouTube the "normal" way though.

(Also; if you're so-inclined you can hook up an RSS feed to a copy of `yt-dlp` and have copies of new videos saved locally for your consumption offline. I suppose.)

Infrapink (he/his/him)
Infrapink (he/his/him)  ·  last month
@pluralistic Since I started using RSS to keep up to date with my YouTube subscriptions, I notice that I've become increasingly intentional and deliberate in what I watch. Youtube.com is designed to keep you browsing listlessly in order to show you more ads. RSS means I only watch what I'm actually interested in.