Hacker News Reader

Comment by yunruse | Hacker News Reader

I’m becoming a real fan of using RSS for anything that fits it – websites, YouTube [0], email newsletters [1]; even books [2]! Honestly I’m tempted to start putting summaries (hacker news, stack exchange, reddit) in my feeds, just to keep me from endless scrolling.

[0] I think Feedly can handle this, but YouTube may have disabled this natively, which is a shame.

[1] I’m a fan of https://kill-the-newsletter.com

[2] Dracula Daily (https://draculadaily.substack.com/about) and Letters from Watson (https://lettersfromwatson.substack.com/about) are quite fun!

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Feeds are definitely still enabled on YouTube at

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC<xyz>

The only complicated part is finding the channel id, which is not always presented directly (sometimes you have a username, sometimes a channel "shortname", now you also have handles... even the YouTube data API itself can only resolve some of them).

I am using the RSSPreview [1] Addon in Firefox, which works for me also on Youtube. The addon brings back the nice RSS Icon in the URL Bar. You can also change to color back to orange so you can spot it easily when a site has an RSS feed.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsspreview/

If you give a channel URL to NetNewsWire, it will figure it out for you. I definitely recommend it, it's the golden standard of RSS readers.

To get the YouTube channel Id: on the channel home page (you may need to reload the page or open it in private mode to avoid caching), open the developer console and enter:

ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId

My best idea was to subscribe to the RSS feed of my getpocket.com account. That way I can save any page anywhere to read it later in my RSS reader.

I created a bookmark to watch YouTube videos from Feedly, it basically creates a playlist from the YouTube videos you're following (20 at a time):

    javascript:!function(){const%20e=document.getElementsByClassName(%22entry%20entry--unread%22),t=[];Array.from(e).forEach(function(e){const%20n=e.getElementsByTagName%28%27a%27%29%5B0%5D,o=/https:\/\/www\.youtube\.com\/watch\%3Fv=(.+)$/.exec(n);o%26%26t.length%3C20%26%26(e.getElementsByClassName(%22EntryMarkAsReadButton%22)[0].click(),t.push(o[1]))}),window.open(%22https://www.youtube.com/watch_videos%3Fvideo_ids=%22+t.join(),%22_blank%22,%22noopener%22,%22noreferrer%22)}();void(0);

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