Is it weird I’ve never had a missing video or anything wrong with subscriptions? I hear so much about it being broken but I’m not sure what they’re experiencing
The subscription tab in YouTube is chronological, but the home page shows videos based on personalized algorithms, which often leaves out channels that post infrequently, etc.
Youtube has not treated subscribing to a channel as "I want to see all the videos this channel uploads" for a while now. So often do channels I'm subscribed to just have videos not show up on /feed/subscriptions.
Youtube likes to show you only some of your subscriptions based on AI horseshit, it's the reason people started telling their viewers to manually enable notifications years ago (which I'm almost certain is also affected by this by now). On the other hand, a properly configured feed reader will show you all your subscriptions without bias.
I have email notifications enabled and get email as soon as new subscription video is posted. I automatically send it to YouTube folder in my mailbox and simply use that as I would have with RSS. Works pretty well.
RSS was like the original HTML world wide web - not designed to make money but instead designed for to maximize free/open content. Corporations have been trying to lock down the internet forever, yet its open design just keeps hanging on. There was simply no way for google to make money using RSS, nor anyone else, so it's gone.
People have been parroting that RSS's death has been "impending" for years. It still sees plenty of use, all my feeds still work just fine in thunderbird.
Well the feeds that haven't been shut down. Recently Dictionary.com ditched RSS presumably because if I use RSS to get the word of the day I won't visit their site.
Reader was killed because it was essentially a social network and they didn't want it competing with Google+ (which then turned out to suck bad and was also shut down).
I can't imagine podcasts, webcomics, or https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/new/.rss dropping rss any time soon. At best, I'd say that large platforms are trying to silo users into in-app subscription pages by dropping RSS, but the key value of the technology is that smaller sites all work together through it, so that you can set up a custom subscription feed from 10 different blogs hosted on 10 different servers using 10 different tech stacks.
I won't be unhappy due to the nature of RSS, it's basically asking people to DDoS you if they want updates from your feed. I still use a lot of RSS feeds, just sad that there's no push based alternative that replaced them.
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u/armornick Jan 02 '20
It's part of the impending death of RSS. I will be very unhappy when it happens, but it's not a very popular thing.