Using RSS to stop Youtube homepage-induced damage
I, for one, am utterly guilty of being addicted to Youtube. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or Mastodon have zero power over me, but YouTube? This service steals hours of my life. I am subscribed to multiple channels, but I also refresh the homepage regularly, hoping to find something.
Luckily it’s easy to keep an eye on some channels while ignoring the algorithm completely using RSS.
Even though it’s quite hidden, each Youtube channel has its own RSS channel: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel_id>. Finding the channel id is not straightforward, but there are dedicated services out there like, like https://commentpicker.com/. So, you can find Level1Techs RSS feed under https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC4w1YQAJMWOz4qtxinq55LQ. Throw it into any RSS reader and voila. Unfortunately, shorts also appear in the feed.
But Youtube has a huge cost for the entire internet. It’s the single most centralized repository (let’s ignore OpenAI for a second) of content out there. Whenever possible, I try to use alternatives, like Odysee. Quite a few channels are already mirroring their uploads there. Odysee also supports RSS - https://odysee.com/$/rss/<channel_name>. This time you can take the channel_name directly from the URL of the Odysee channel, so System Crafter’s RSS feed can be found under https://odysee.com/$/rss/@SystemCrafters:e.