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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t done it in awhile, but it’s getting close to where I’m probably going to pull the trigger.

As a general rule I do not login to YouTube. Instead I have some creators that I informally follow. And then, when my feed starts getting corrupted, I obliterate all vestiges of YouTube from my browser, start “fresh”, and re-prime with my list of favorites.

Also, as a rule, if something catches my eye, I open it in a private window, so as to limit my feed corruption.

It’s far too easy to click on a video and you are seemingly marked for life. Easy enough to reset and start over than fight the tide against you.

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> Also, as a rule, if something catches my eye, I open it in a private window, so as to limit my feed corruption.

I do this too, however I suspect YouTube is guessing that's what I'm doing (from my mouse hovering over the video to right click it, perhaps) because my feed still seems to get corrupted, just more slowly.

I'm fairly certain it also does some traffic correlation by IP or similar. Probably on the logic that if someone else in your household (sharing the same gateway) likes a video you might too. Of course this also ends up associating things I open in a private window or with NewPipe with my account.

I wish that YouTube allowed RSS. If I could get an RSS feed for my favorite channels, I would be a happy guy!

It does, kind of.

It's not really officially advertised but it is first party, this guide [0] shows how to find it but it's just https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... and the guide just explains how to find CHANNELID since it isn't explicitly shared (which amounts to going a channel page, viewing page source, and searching for "browse_id" which will be a key in a JSON string where the value is the channel ID).

[0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtub...

i use freetube as a client. it can track channels without a youtube account.

if you click a video by accident, you can go to history and remove it from 'watch videos'. Or as you said open it in private tab.

You could just self host an alternative front end, is probably easier that way

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