Two months ago, I deleted my YouTube subscriptions. I now follow YouTube channels in my feed reader instead (I use the NetNewsWire app). How does that work? Is it better?
How to follow a channel
- Copy link to the YouTube channel.
- Paste into your feed reader.
- That’s it!
On desktop, or on the mobile site, copy from the addres bar when on any channel page, or from the share sheet, or copy a link to any channel in the search results (via right-click or long-press).
In the YouTube mobile app you can get the link via the “Copy link” button. Today, that sits in the unlabeled three-dotted “Share” menu.
Reader experience
How does the fead reader experience compare to YouTube’s own “Subscriptions” page?
I used to triage the YouTube Subscriptions page by either clicking “Hide” on videos I’m not interested in, via the three-dot menu on YouTube, or by adding videos to a “Watch Later” playlist. This regularly breaks and causes discomfort in a number of ways. By using a feed reader, we get:
Fast and efficient triage. I now spend less time “managing” my YouTube stuff. I quickly swipe past videos I’m not interested in, each automatically marked as read. Videos to watch later, I star. Or, I watch ’em right there with fullscreen and picture-in-picture support! (Works even without the YouTube app!) If I want to do something with the video on YouTube, it’s one tap on the post title (or the big “Watch on YouTube” button), and e.g. add to any playlist, or stream to a Chromecast or Smart TV.
No sense of urgency. I am happy to no longer feel compelled to regularly open the YouTube app “just in case”, and am no longer urged to triage new videos from the YouTube Subscriptions page before they disappear. (YouTube deletes stuff there after a few weeks.) I can now trust that new uploads are reliably delivered, and never lost.
Reclaimed sense of agency. Native apps tend to make it hard to let you finish a thought when you open them, by presenting you with options or otherwise distracting you. Now, I only end up in the app via a specific video link from the feed reader. This means I have decided what to do, and the technology knows my intent, so the app opens and goes straight to that one video. There is no “Home” feed or “Shorts” page to navigate past. (In case you’re interested, I describe further down how to disable “Home” and “Shorts” in the YouTube mobile app more generally.)
Behind the scenes
This is all possible because YouTube implements two open standards: it provides feeds in the RSS format, and a discovery link that lets you follow the channel from its web page (without needing to know about or find the URL to an RSS file).
Pet peeves of the app
Until recently, the main way I used YouTube (both via its website on desktop, and through its mobile app) was through the “Subscriptions” page.
“Home” page
I’ve always disabled watch history on my YouTube account. As of 2023, YouTube no longer offers non-personalised recommendations to logged-in users through the Home page. That means my YouTube “Home” page is now a clean landing page with nothing but a welcoming search bar.
It took YouTube ten years to decide this. I wonder if they thought the semi-personal recommendations were not useful (they seemed fine to me?), or whether YouTube is simply becoming more honest and bold in pushing their preferred economic transaction (use the platform in exchange for your consent to store and analyze your watch history, even if paying for Premium. If you disable watch history, they intentionally try to make it worse?). I don’t miss it, but I didn’t mind it either.
How to disable YouTube Shorts, for real!
Around the same time in 2023, YouTube decided to no longer let logged-in users access the endless Shorts feature via the YouTube app, unless you enable watch history. That’s been an absolute blessing. I miss nothing there.
Except perhaps the transparency. I would sometimes study what it serves to other people. Note that the endless Shorts feed is still available via the website when logged-out, so the generic version of this feature remains available there for anthropological research.
Perennial breaking of “Hide”
The “Hide” option on the subs page lets you maintain a list of videos from channels you follow. This UI feature on YouTube is buggy. It breaks all the time, and Google takes months to prioritize fixing it. I remember when YouTube Shorts was introduced and force-fed throughout the platform, the “Hide” button for Shorts on the subs page did nothing. Google probably didn’t intentionally launch Shorts with a broken “Hide” button. But, the lack of test coverage and lack of bug priority are a direct consequence of internal success metrics at YouTube — directing engineering teams toward what is valued and rewarded by management, and away from what is not.
Unreliable delivery
YouTube’s subscription system is famously unreliable. It is a decade-old meme at this point. Their system might report some “9s” after 99.9% internally, but it is expected that on a service used by millions, this bug affects everyone. People I talk to are affected multiple times a year. And, it doesn’t self-correct! Compare this to texting or emailing: When have you not received a message addressed to you? I don’t mean arrive late or miss the notification, but never arrive to your inbox? I suspect YouTube implements their subscribtion system such that new videos are individually added to a separate queue for each subscriber. And, if the stars don’t align for all milions of those one-shot attempts, there is no retry, and no on-demand detection or reconstruction. This is good enough for an algorithmic feed, but not for a personal subscription system.
YouTube is not in the business of delivering what you expect or ask for (unlike Netflix, Apple TV, or linear television). It is in the business of eyeball retention, by serving up whatever is “good enough” to keep users in the app. Step one: Minimize your use of the app.