YouTube Without the Feed

Updates from the YouTube channels I follow on News Explorer my favorite RSS reader.

I am very grateful for all the intelligent, creative and inspiring work that gets uploaded to YouTube. When I find the channel of a small creator with a few thousand subscribers, it feels like finding a treasure, left there for me, only, to discover.

The platform is one of a kind amidst the sea of ever-shorter viral content; it encourages long-form video, which is at odds with the current Silicon Valley experiments in dopamine overflow, though most engagement is still flowing to the clickbait content like that of MrBeast, which in June 2024 officially became the first YouTube billionaire with stunts of philanthropy for the sake of publicity¹. Though YouTube is more respectful than other platforms regarding their users’ preference in not being subjected to that kind of content, it still desperately wants you to watch it, as most of its revenue comes from the successful ads of the clickbait masters which have ascended to the private circle of YouTube partners.

YouTube is a big-tech platform that needs to make money, and because of this, their feed will inevitably drown out the small creators in the name of engagement, breaking with the end-to-end principle as all platforms are tempted to do. Small creators plead with their audience to “hit the bell” (meaning: enabling optional direct notifications for updates coming from their channel), or direct them to other spaces (Patreon, Substack, etc.) where they have a more direct contact with their audience (see the POSSE concept). Others who do everything right to play nice with the algorithm are fighting a black box that might turn on them at any moment.

The best, cheapest, simplest solution to this problem is RSS, an open standard as old as the internet. It allows you to subscribe to updates from every kind of website that implements it and read/watch/listen to these updates in your preferred way.

YouTube still provides a hidden RSS feed for individual channels, though it is unclear why, as Google obviously wants to keep users locked on their platform where they can serve ads and sponsored content to them. It seems like YouTube once provided an “OPML Export” option, that is: a way to make a file containing links to all of your subscribed channels as RSS feeds that you could then import into every RSS reader under the sun. That option has been removed, but I wrote a quick script to reproduce the behavior.

Go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels
In your browser’s console, run the following script. This will download a youtube-subscriptions.opml
Import the OPML file into your RSS reader. On the Apple ecosystem I suggest News Explorer (paid) and NetNewsWire (free).

(function downloadOpml() {
  const channelTags = Array.from(
    document.querySelectorAll("ytd-channel-renderer"),
  )
    .map((x) => ({
      id: x.data.channelId,
      name: x.data.title.simpleText,
      handle: x.data.subscriberCountText.simpleText,
    }))
    .sort((a, b) => a.name.localeCompare(b.name))
    .map((x) => {
      return `<outline text="${x.handle}" title="${x.name}" description="" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="https://www.youtube.com/${x.handle}" xmlUrl="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=${x.id}" />`;
    });

  const opml = `
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <opml version="1.1">
      <head>
        <title>YouTube Subscriptions</title>
      </head>
      <body>
        <outline text="YouTube" title="YouTube">
          ${channelTags.join("\n          ")}
        </outline>
      </body>
    </opml>
  `.trim();

  const a = Object.assign(document.createElement("a"), {
    download: "youtube-subscriptions.opml",
    href: URL.createObjectURL(new Blob([opml], { type: "text/plain" })),
  });
  document.body.append(a);
  a.click();
})();

“But why take from the wealth of the rich in the name of justice if we can serve foie gras to the poor at royal feasts?” («Mais pourquoi ponctionner la fortune des riches au nom de la justice si on peut servir du foie gras aux pauvres dans les festins royaux?»). Dahlia Namia, La société de provocation – Essai sur l’obscénité des riches, Lux, 2024, p.46. ↩

Footnotes