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scripts/blog-migrated/no_more_youtube.yaml

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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: 2024-05-02
+
+content: |
+  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!