A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, “algorithms” and AI.
What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author’s views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.
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.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.
That’s super helpful, thank you for sharing! I appreciate it :)