I think I broke my YouTube.

How we got here.

I previously wrote a blog post about how I was changing the way I used the platform. The idea was that I changed my landing page to the Subscriptions landing page instead of the Home one. This way I'm only seeing the videos from creators I want to see videos from. The result was that it was harder for me to be recommended stuff that I don't really need by the algorithm, instead discovery would come from real human beings, whether that's friends, family, or other creators promoting other creators.

The key of keeping my Subscriptions feed clean, was that after I watched a video, I'd tell youtube to "Hide" it. Eventually I was seeing videos in the feed from 6 months ago, because I would just keep hiding stuff I'd already seen. Sometimes I'd see a video I hadn't watched from a few months back, and I’d get a chance to catch up on something I'd missed from a creator, which was nice.

Then YouTube Got Weird

But something really interesting happened once I hid pretty much every video in my feed dating back to December of 2024.

YouTube kind of… broke?

I still get new videos, but now it times itself out fetching videos from over 8 months ago.

The youtube subscription feed, by default, is a three column grid. Every time a new video is uploaded, older videos get pushed down the grid. Like instagram. In this picture I have three new videos in my feed. Beyond that is nothing but gray boxes.

Things get interesting when I get a fourth video that would push one of the three recent videos into a row Gray Boxes. That video won't be shown to me until I hide something else. I think the idea is that youtube will only show a row of videos if they're all under this mysterious threshold that makes youtube time out. Which at this point I can only assume is "made in 2025."

Below is a short video(no audio) of how it gets all screwy.

A video of how my youtube subscriptions feed broke.

In the video, you can see how I have one row of new videos. Under that is all the gray boxes representing old videos (pre-2025) that YouTube won’t fetch. However there is a fourth that I haven’t hid that is “lost in the gray”. We see it appear in the top row, when I hide a video. Then, once I hide that video, it totally breaks the feed, because I only have two videos from this year left. So instead of showing the two and a gray box, it just grays everything out.

Weird, right?

So now I have to change how I use YouTube again.

The Return of An Old Flame, RSS

A while back, I started tinkering on my own self-hosted home page. I run an application called Dashy, which is a customizable dashboard that I host locally and can access from my web browser. Dashy has been kind of fun to learn, and I could probably do more with it. It's mostly a collection of useful links to webpages that I use either for productivity or fun.

I even have a little weather app that looks like the weather channel from the 1990's.

From this dashboard I have a special link to an RSS reader called FreshRSS that I also self-host.

I thought RSS feeds were the coolest way to customize our consumption of media, as it gave so much control to the user to shape how they consume content. As I've shifted away from social media platforms like X, Facebook and whatever else-  I find myself back with RSS, trying to rekindle our old flame.

Generally I use RSS feeds for news about topics I'm interested in, like tech or horror movies or blog posts about tabletop RPGs. Now I've decided that because YouTube's website has failed me, I'm going to migrate my subscription feeds to my RSS reader.

How does one do that?

Great question.

You could go to every individual creator's page and copy and paste their page url: https://www.youtube.com/@getoutofdepth like that.

Or, and I had no idea I could do this, you can go to takeout.google.com, which allows you to export alllllllll of your data that is associated with google applications.

Thankfully you can ask it to only export your YouTube subscriptions into a handy little .CSV file. That file will have the Channel ID, the URL to their Channel and the Channel name. Now instead of using a web browser and pulling up every channel, we have every link in a text format for quick copying.

Now Fresh RSS is where I read my news, and watch new videos from the creators I enjoy.

And I like it, because it's another barrier between me and the time suck of YouTube recommendations. And when I watch a video, Fresh RSS hides it from me. It doesn't even get mad about it.

It's kind of like me and RSS were high school sweethearts but we drifted apart. She took a lot of effort to be with, and there were other girls out there who were sexy looking, and whispered sweet nothings about being the future of Web 2.0. They just gave me what I thought I wanted and were way less maintenance.

So I broke up with RSS to be with Social Media. But all of them ended up turning into psychos, who were only interested in themselves and they made me feel alone despite spending all day with them.

So after something like 18 years I finally realized I could do better, and got a divorce. I've moved into a studio apartment, because of course Social Media kept the house.

Then one day, while I was trying to sort my shit out, RSS showed up and we started chatting. And I realized that back then I wasn't mature enough the first time around, and that the best relationships are worth the effort.

So now me and RSS are straight up bangin' again and it's the best.

What?

I don't know I got carried away with the metaphor.

The point is, I want the internet to suck less, and it's going to take effort. And a better internet is worth the effort.

Inspirations and Further Reading

Here’s a list of links and ideas from other people that have inspired me to put more effort and intention in how I use the internet, and how I’m making my own space on the internet.

Andrew Blackman: No, RSS isn’t dead!

RSS.com: How do RSS Feeds Work?

STAY OUT OF DEPTH

Hey if you enjoy the work Jae is doing, whether it’s this blog post or the podcast, and you’d like to keep in touch, the best place to do that is our Patreon.

www.patreon.com/getoutofdepth

Patreon now allows anyone with an account to follow a creator for FREE. So you don’t have to spend money to hear what Jae has been up to. Of course there are some perks to being a paid member, but we’ll let you investigate that on your own.

Thanks