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