In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.

You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...

This is very useful, thank you for sharing.

Doesn't seem to work for any of the ~50 URLs I tried with. Eg:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...

... works but:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...

... is 404.

I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.

Sorry, my notes were lacking. Change UC to UULF and use it with this URL to get the Videos feed for a channel:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFS0N...

> DF Tube extension

This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.

:(

I'm curious if there is anyone who has any resources or anecdotal observations on why and how individuals/groups are spinning up bots that seems to be pushing the internet to this new reality. I've found a pretty interesting analysis of Meliorator[1], which is specific to foreign influence. But it seems like there are pieces missing for me.

Is engagement and ad revenue so great that it's worth setting up infrastructure to pump out this type of low effort 'content'?

1. https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf