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Comment by vsund | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what I don't understand about all the feed readers out there. It seems so obvious that the next step for feed readers would be social interactions like sharing, also it would be to easy to add I guess.

Additionally the aspect of consuming YouTube via RSS feed. Feed readers could simply add small logic which transforms a given YouTube account into one of

  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<account_id>
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<account_name>

And so on for similar services. RSS has such great potential but somehow nobody uses all of it.

Is there anything I miss? Why don't feed readers support external services (like the YouTube example from above)? Why don't feed readers add social features?

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RSS is used by those who aren't into "social" addiction, but just want a quick listing of relevant news from a super-simple news feed (as in "really simple syndication"). A couple years ago Google embraced, extended and almost extinguished RSS, so I'm not sure RSS users are willing to obtain/share their feed URLs from a pointless central service; just go to the web sites you're reading frequently, check if they have an RSS feed announced in their HTML metadata (as indicated by an RSS symbol in eg. FF), and add the URL to your feeds.

Because RSS gives readers too much signal, and not enough noise (ads, profiling), and doesn't keep users within the walled garden ecosystems. That's why apps are popular, too. It is all about control. Another disadvantage is that RSS doesn't have native incremental updates, which increases data volume. Though that isn't very relevant in 2018.

As an RSS lover, I have zero interest in social features. If I occasionally want to share something, I can email/WhatsApp/Slack the URL; but for the most part I don't, and I'm able to read without the distraction and noise.

You can add the RSS feed of a youtube channel with the Tiny Tiny RSS bookmarklet, it's working for most channels, but not all for a reason I don't understand yet.

YouTube channel feeds, if they have one, are at: www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel_id} Some channels have a custom url and the id isn't obvious but it should be in the page source somewhere.

For example, "It's Okay To Be Smart" is at "www.youtube.com/user/itsokaytobesmart". Right click, view page source, search for "/channel/". That finds "<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH4BNI0-FOK2dMXoFtViWHw">". So the feed url is:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCH4BNI0-FOK2dMXoFtViWHw

I'm not sure what the relationship between channels and users is. I think it's many-to-many and I'm aware of 3 feed types:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username>  
    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel id>  
    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playlist id>

Would love to hear if there are more.

Woah, I spent more time than I care to admit trying to find some feeds. I thought I had the secret sauce all figured out :) https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=itsokaytobesma... is much easier to use. I can think of a few channels where the play list thing will come in handy if it works. Gamers where I only want to see 1 out of 50 games they play and are who are orginized enough to keep seperate playlist is one example. You can't even do that with YouTubes own subscription method as far as I know.

Feedly?

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