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Comment by miiiiiike | Hacker News Reader

What I’d really like is a YouTube TiVo.

There are about 100 channels that I watch religiously, but, release infrequently. I never want to miss a video from these channels.

I also don’t want to open YouTube and sift through hundreds of releases from channels that release four times/day just to find the 1-2 videos that I actually want to watch (and will inevitably miss.)

Just give me a priority feed of the stuff I actually want/need to watch. If I can download everything and watch it over DLNA, even better,

Making sure we don’t miss the things we love isn’t YouTube’s M.O. Keeping the feedbag strapped to our faces while we watch someone stretch a 3 minute video into a 18-22 minute one, is.

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This feels like it's covered by YouTube subscriptions, no? Subscribe to those 100 channels, bookmark your subscriptions page, and presto! You now have a priority feed of the stuff you want to watch and nothing else.

Maybe you just don't want to create an account, which is fine (NewPipe is a great fit), but it's a bit weird to see you say that "making sure we don’t miss the things we love isn’t YouTube’s M.O." when there's an entire page dedicated to a chronologically-sorted list of videos from channels you pick.

I have hundreds of subs. With no way to create sub tiers the channels putting out multiple releases a day quickly overwhelm the ones with fewer.

So, you have hundreds of subs but only care about a hundred of them, and that's YouTube's fault?

Why do you subscribe to channels whose content you don't watch?

He wants to watch them, but doesn't care if he misses any since they put out so much. Compared to the other ones that don't put out much and he never wants to miss.

I don't have this particular problem, but maybe they want YT to support these creators, even if they don't have time to watch it all.

> maybe they want YT to support these creators

or maybe those creators brings more money to YT...

Youtube’s fault is that subs get sorted at random and you have to scroll through to see that blue dot. It is hostile to a user by design and will never make pinnable subs or sort/grouping modes.

You could use separate Youtube channels for this. Use one to subscribe only to the infrequently releasing channels.

Newpipe takes care of this pretty well. You can select what it calls "Channel groups", which would be a feed of a subset of your subscriptions.

The problem is if one channel only uploads once a month and another channel uploads twice a day, I will see many videos from the frequent upload channels and might miss the infrequent uploads. If it was just a list of channels with their most recent video I'd see a new thumbnail and know to check that channel for any new videos.

I just unsubscribe from the spam channel because they're producing too much noise. I don't need content producers like that in my life, and making it less obvious that they're adding mostly noise is just disguising the problem, not solving it.

Good for you, but that’s not a solution if you have mixed interests, e.g. you want to get daily entertainment content to choose from and content that is deeper than that. You may not need it, but if you can’t do that anyway it’s indistinguishable from coping.

All I'm saying is that this appears to be an extremely niche use case, and OP's line about YouTube not wanting you to find things from channels you love is over the top. They have a very specific requirement that YouTube hadn't addressed, that's very different than YouTube being designed to prevent you from finding subscriptions.

I don’t think so. Youtube is search, explore and usage hostile for many years. Not sure how one can miss that. “Which channels have new videos” is not niche. They even have it (a blue dot), but either fail to sort or intentionally sort channels seemingly randomly. I’ve missed videos from rare channels too due to this “mechanic”.

You could use an RSS reader to subscrib to the video feeds for the channels where you don't want to miss anything. That's how I used to follow channels I care about (currently none) because I don't want to be subjected to YouTube's algorithms or have to check yet another website.

Hacker News.

Making sure we don’t miss the things we love definitely isn’t YouTube’s MO. I have channels I subscribed to, turned on notifications for, and still miss videos from. It does, however, spam my phone with notifications about channels I'm not subbed to.

NewPipe works great for this usecase. Just get rid of the "Default Kiosk" column as content of main page, leave the "What's New" and watch only videos from channels that you subscribe to (on NewPipe, it's not integrated in any way with a Google Account).

NewPipe is my gateway drug for getting people into sideloading and fdroid. It's such a great app.

If anyone is reading this and doesn't know about NewPipe, it's a google free youtube front end. It's well worth installing.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

Thanks, I'll check it out. Unfortunately, Apple TV support is a requirement as well.

I believe youtube still uses RSS. Could try using that

I was just going to suggest this. I don't use Youtube logged in anymore or have any subscriptions, I instead subscribe to any I want to follow via RSS feeds. Any Youtube channel has its own native RSS feed, no third party service required. You could create different lists in your RSS client of choice for your different priorities.

It's pretty easy - I have the FeedBro chrome extension (there are many RSS clients, that is just one) and a typical youtube RSS entry for a channel lookes like

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...

that's the channel ID for Cutting Edge Engineering in QLD, Australia (mechanical engineering for life size mining | civil tonka toys)

This is exactly what I do as well. Instead of subscribing on YouTube, I just subscribe to the RSS feeds of channels I'm interested in and then use my feedreader to go through them channel by channel.

I use Invidious for this purpose. Has a priority feed only on subscriptions which is great. I would say it’s not great for discoverability, but if that’s not a use case I’d look at it.

Will check it out. Thanks.

There's the fraidycat extension that I use to do exactly that:

https://fraidyc.at/

You could subscribe separetly to these channels on freetube (desktop) or newpipe(mobile).

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