A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, “algorithms” and AI.

What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author’s views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.

  • The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org
    11·
    22 hours ago

    It’s a really good video. He did a very good job putting words to my thoughts too, I’ve struggled to say why I don’t like AI beyond “it’s not very good at things”, but as he touches on in the video, that is only one small part.

    I was also very surprised by the 3% statistic, I think I watch nearly everything from my subscriptions, the recommended is either completely useless from whatever the algorithm has decided I want or showing me videos I intentionally didn’t watch.

    I went and followed him on Mastodon, and in that thread learned you can just add a channel to an RSS feed by using the link to their channel. I’m sure that’s old news to some, but as I already use an RSS app, I’m going to start switching over I think.

    • 001Guy001@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      14 hours ago

      I’ve been using RSS to keep up with channels and it’s been great. I recently found out that you can use a different feed url to only get the main videos from the channel (to filter out shorts and livestreams)

      So instead of the channel url (which gets converted to https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...) you use https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULF... (might stand for User Uploads Long Form)

      If you use an addon (like Feedbro) you can automatically get the first rss URL and manually convert it by clicking on Find Feeds In Current Tab when on the channel’s page, then right-click copy the “rss” hyperlink. Otherwise, you can look for the channel ID in the page source by searching for =UC.

    • Spezi@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      16 hours ago

      Wow. That RSS feature surely is like >15 years old and by now it’s so irrelevant they just forgot to shut it down. Because no one uses RSS anymore these days, and subscribing like that does absolutely nothing for YouTube’s business model.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
        2·
        5 hours ago

        I’m still using RSS. YouTube lives off ads/subscriptions, they don’t care how you find the videos.