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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Note that every subreddit and every Youtube channel is also an RSS feed. I have to imagine that some rogue engineeers snuck that functionality in over a decade ago and that it's simply escaped the notice of any PMs or bean counters since then.

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> I have to imagine that some rogue engineeers snuck that functionality in over a decade ago and that it's simply escaped the notice of any PMs or bean counters since then.

Nothing really rouge about it. Google was big on RSS initially as a way to subscribe to content across the web. They had their own RSS Reader after all.

Yet, Chrome added an experimental "Follow" feature in 2021 for RSS subscriptions [1]. Edge did the same calling it "Follow Creators" that mostly focuses on YouTube but also uses RSS [2].

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2021/05/an-experiment-in-helping-u...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/17/22887626/microsoft-edge-y...

It probably doesn't cost them much to keep the RSS feed going, and it's a way to keep a subset of people coming back to watch videos that otherwise wouldn't.

For instance, I dislike having to open YouTube to see what's new (or get notified by email) so I end up missing a lot of new videos from a handful of channels I consistently watch. Once I discovered there the RSS feed for videos, I added them to NetNewsWire on the Mac and it's been a much nicer way to see what's new.

So for people like me that would probably never watch new content, the RSS feed offers another way for YouTube to get me back on the site. That being said, I hope they don't kill it.

It very likely costs a bit if you think of it like a bean counter, in terms of "lost ad views." Though in fairness, if you're using RSS to browse Reddit, and you're not using an ad-blocker, you sound like you've all but gone out of your way to view their ads.

I would think the opposite -- YouTube makes most of their money from advertising on videos, so the driving goal is to get users to watch as many videos as possible. The algorithm they use is a big part of that, but RSS feeds are probably a pretty good way to get people who only watch a handful of channels back the site (as the RSS feeds are just links to the video pages, without video embeds).

That's a valid take. Though, not all videos are equally ad-ridden. I suspect if I were to start using rss to subscribe to channels I'd be favoring those that don't make much use of them. But yes, it's not so cut and dry.

When youtube and reddit started almost every website had an rss feed, so I doubt anyone had to sneak it in.

Ah, but the parent comment does so much to fuel the narrative of conflict that makes places like the Fediverse so appealing to some.

And you’re merely fueling the narrative of “everything is simply fueling someone’s narrative.”

Aaron Swartz was behind RSS and Reddit, so it's also doubtful that he had to sneak the technology he developed into the service he was developing

Thank you SO MUCH for pointing this out: I never knew about YouTube being a feed. I will make a YouTube video demonstrating this so those who use RSS readers will be able to monitor my channel.

Every YouTube playlist has an RSS feed too. Unfortunately they always show the top fifteen items and there’s seemingly no way to reverse that, making the feeds useless when creators add new episodes to the bottom of the playlist instead of the top (which is fairly common).

> every Youtube channel is also an RSS feed

Handy if you parse that into something like SQLite and use that as input for something like `yt-dlp` for channels you want to follow but which are generally unwatchable "live" due to, e.g., a 15 minute video having a near-2 minute sponsor segment and 5 inserted ad-breaks.

Or if you only want certain uploads from a channel, e.g. "A Closer Look" from "Late Night With Seth Meyers", it's simple to filter the RSS and only watch/fetch those.

Very interesting to learn this, and sad to know at the same time that it could probably rot and degrade over time. I wonder if YouTube clients like newpipe use those RSS feeds.

This is literally the way I used Reddit for pretty much the entire time I did. I don't get how anyone tolerates the actual site.

And it's how I use Lemmy now that I've switched over.

Youtube...that may be handy for. But I think the channels I follow regularly like that also publish as a podcast, and most of the time I'm fine with the audio-only versions.

Yep. This is how I follow people on youtube. So much more convenient.

Every stackoverflow user too. I've been following an interesting guy who bangs out multiple high quality and extremely interesting answers every day.

On what subjects does he give answers? If those subjects interest me, I may like to subscribe too.

Shh! Don't tell them!

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