Blog posts (#2)

* Blog posts

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Co-authored-by: Joe Carstairs <65492573+Sycamost@users.noreply.github.com>

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+---
+title: How I made YouTube work for me
+description: >-
+  I just learned YouTube channels have an RSS feed. This is terrific news.
+pubDate:
+  year: 2024
+  month: 05
+  day: 02
+---
+
+One of my bad habits in life is wandering through YouTube. I've always had
+AutoPlay turned off, but I still found myself switching off and sleepwalking
+from one 'recommendation' to the next.
+
+A lot of what I watch in these times is crap. It's often when I'm tired and just
+want to switch off, so naturally enough, longer, more emotionally or
+intellectually material – in other words, exactly the kind of videos I actually
+**do** want to watch – I ignore. (For me, it's often mediocre sketch comedy
+videos. That's my poison, it turns out.)
+
+Now, there is a time for switching off and doing something light. But I don't
+want watching junk videos to be my answer. Any more than when I'm hungry after
+a long day of work, I don't want to be resorting to junk food all the time. I
+really want to get out of this bad habit, and though it's not a huge problem,
+I've still not been able to fully kick it, either.
+
+Still, there are YouTube channels I really _want_ to keep up with. Musicians.
+Short film channels. Video essayists. And, yes, even one or two sketch channels:
+though YouTube is a bit flooded with sketch comedy, some it is really good and
+brings me joy, and that's a good thing!
+
+This is where RSS comes in.
+
+So if you don't know, an RSS file is a file someone puts on their website which
+tells you, in a standard format, what pages are on their website. It's a pretty
+old standard in Web terms, and it's very stable. There are a wide range of apps
+out there, called 'feed readers', which you can use to keep track of RSS feeds,
+notifying you when something new gets published in your website and putting it
+in a feed for you to review.
+
+It turns out YouTube channels have RSS feeds.
+
+This is terrific news.
+
+It means I can use my RSS feed reader to subscribe to YouTube channels, instead
+of YouTube's own subscription system.
+
+And that means I don't need any of YouTube's personalisation features. I can
+delete all my search history, all my watch history, and stop them from
+collecting any more. This means YouTube is now incapable of providing
+recommendations that I'm actually likely to click on. Which is exactly what I
+want.
+
+This is what my YouTube homepage looks like right now:
+
+![My YouTube homepage with a blank space where the recommendations used to be](/images/blog/2024/05/02/beautiful_youtube_homepage.jpg)
+
+So I can both subscribe to the channels I'm genuinely interested in, and not
+get sucked into watching junk.
+
+Awesome!