‘The Last Chronological Feed Gets No Love’
Matt Birchler, writing at Birchtree:
And yet this page seems to get no love. I see articles about escaping the YouTube algorithm or sneaky ways to find the RSS feeds for channels. I get the urge to follow along in your RSS app, and I would love if YouTube made it easier to find those feeds, but I think more people should use the subscriptions page since I so often feel like the complaints I see about YouTube are basically completely solved if people would just bookmark YouTube’s subscriptions page rather than the home page.
Matt makes a good case for using YouTube’s subscriptions page so as not to miss any videos from your favorite creators. But I’m one of those weirdos who wants fewer apps to check every day, so, yes, I also subscribe via RSS. As Matt mentioned, it can be a huge hassle to find a channel’s RSS feed, and I used to use a shortcut to make it less painful. But these days, my RSS app of choice, Reeder, does all the heavy lifting. A while back, it gained the ability to grab the RSS feed for any channel just by pasting in the URL to its channel or any of its videos.
As a bonus, since all my videos show up alongside articles, I can use my favorite shortcut to send the video URL to the right place for watching later. This ‘Save for Later’ shortcut accepts any URL and routes it based on the domain. I’ve got youtube.com and vimeo.com links going to Play, music.apple.com links going to MusicBox, and everything else is saved to Pocket.