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Comment by dugite-code | Hacker News Reader

I only subscribe to youtube channels with RSS. It's the only practical way to always see new videos on a channel. I find it honestly baffling me to see the hoops creators I subscribe to have to beg people to jump through to maaaybeee get notified when there is a new video up.

They used to have an OPML export, but it looks like it was removed

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> the only practical way to always see new videos

What's wrong with the "subscriptions" tab/page on yt?

It will sometimes just not show a video from a creator for unknown reasons or it will disappear between sessions. It's been an issue that's popped up regularly over the years on the youtube support forums so it looks like even that is not a pure feed of content and is subject to the whims of the "algorithm".

Not to mention the notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable

> an issue that's popped up regularly over the years... looks like even that is not a pure feed of content

Sounds more like a bug affecting some small % of users a long time ago, and was fixed.

> notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable

What does that even mean? It works fine for me. I see the exact same videos on mobile and desktop (65 subs).

A time it failed me is a content creator I follow who puts out social commentary on a variety of subjects, usually critising the moderation of YouTube, his video would not show in the subscriptions page and viewers would have to navigate to his channel and watch from there.

It's not a straight feed (like you'd expect), it's more like recommendations so not all videos show up on it.

This isn't true, and it's easy to check: go to your subscriptions page and compare to each channels' published videos. There should be none missing.

I have 65 subs, and 100% of the videos from each channel are on my subscriptions page, with some channels publishing only once a month, or once a quarter.

I don't think so... I've never seen the subscriptions tab skipping a video of the channels I follow.

For some channels I only watch some of their content. RSS allows me to add filters based on the video name. Plus, my RSS client works like email, so I can mark as read or unread easily.

This would be a good use case for an RSS feed of your own subscriptions, but sadly YT does not support that.

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