How I made YouTube work for me

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:

So I can both subscribe to the channels I’m genuinely interested in, and not get sucked into watching junk.

Awesome!