Wow. That RSS feature surely is like >15 years old and by now it’s so irrelevant they just forgot to shut it down. Because no one uses RSS anymore these days, and subscribing like that does absolutely nothing for YouTube’s business model.
Comment on Algorithms are breaking how we think - Technology Connections
The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org 1 week ago
It’s a really good video. He did a very good job putting words to my thoughts too, I’ve struggled to say why I don’t like AI beyond “it’s not very good at things”, but as he touches on in the video, that is only one small part.
I was also very surprised by the 3% statistic, I think I watch nearly everything from my subscriptions, the recommended is either completely useless from whatever the algorithm has decided I want or showing me videos I intentionally didn’t watch.
I went and followed him on Mastodon, and in that thread learned you can just add a channel to an RSS feed by using the link to their channel. I’m sure that’s old news to some, but as I already use an RSS app, I’m going to start switching over I think.
Spezi@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
jarfil@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I’m still using RSS. YouTube lives off ads/subscriptions, they don’t care how you find the videos.
001Guy001@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I’ve been using RSS to keep up with channels and it’s been great. I recently found out that you can use a different feed url to only get the main videos from the channel (to filter out shorts and livestreams)
So instead of the channel url (which gets converted to
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC…) you usehttps://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULF…(might stand for User Uploads Long Form)If you use an addon (like Feedbro) you can automatically get the first rss URL and manually convert it by clicking on Find Feeds In Current Tab when on the channel’s page, then right-click copy the “rss” hyperlink. Otherwise, you can look for the channel ID in the page source by searching for
=UC.Zoop@beehaw.org 1 week ago
That’s super helpful, thank you for sharing! I appreciate it :)
ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
That’s really cool, I miss more things being outwardly interoperable. Very useful feature, I can’t wait until they deem it too usable and remove it.
I was explaining RSS to a friend (I follow their Substack blog via RSS, yes, I read it in the ugly Feedbro interface) and they were a bit weirded out by the idea until I went into how this was kind of a default option a few years ago.
One day I’ll have a home server setup that will keep the Web 2.0 dream alive for me.