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cromka • today at 8:38 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I pay for YT premium but noticed the quality of recommendations is subpar yet I still end up wasting time watching it. So I decided I need to limit my feed to my subscribed videos only, which YT app makes annoyingly difficult.

How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?


Replies

0fflineuser • today at 9:16 PM

Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.

I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.

Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend. So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.

So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.

I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).

nwmck • today at 8:41 PM

I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.

➕ show 1 reply
aeriose • today at 8:39 PM

YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying