this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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YouTube is doing A/B testing of the Subscriptions feed (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by blobjim@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
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It is now in a grid layout and I can't switch it to the list view. Worse, some videos are now out of order chronologically i.e. a video from 4 hours ago appears before one from 3 hours ago.

Feels like part of the continued march towards algorithmization of every last major internet service. The ultimate goal presumably being to make it easier and easier to censor things, Facebook style.

Presumably the channel RSS feeds will continue to work...

Unfortunately video hosting is one of those services that costs a lot to run so it isn't easy to replace.

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[–] mickey@hexbear.net 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Feels like part of the continued march towards algorithmization of every last major internet service. The ultimate goal presumably being to make it easier and easier to censor things, Facebook style.

I think the removing of dates videos were published was the Rubicon moment in this. It serves the general trend of enshittification in terms of forcing people to eNgAgE with the platform longer, but there is so much independent news and analysis delivered on YT that the capital class doesn't like threatening their media PR empires. They are stripping us of our very ability to orient ourselves temporally; I hate the antichrist, etc.

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I wish people would just run blogs (with videos if desired) on their own websites (with an RSS feed). But that is much harder to monetize. People make videos and put them on YouTube because you can make a lot more money off of video ads. But anyone not focused on monetization via video ads should probably not be relying on YouTube.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 16 points 1 month ago

Besides monetization, there is discoverability. The algorithm handles marketing for you, attracting new viewers and reminding your past viewers that you exist. On the other hand, users have to intentionally visit blogs or sign up for emails etc.

[–] Snort_Owl@hexbear.net 28 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I spent 2 weeks making myself not watch YouTube and i very rapidly realised i dont care about anything on there except the occasional eddy burback video so i can stare at his moustache

[–] Notcontenttobequiet@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

I think about his AI psychosis video like once a week

[–] reddit@hexbear.net 25 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Scumfucks. I started using the RSS feeds for every channel I follow and never looked back. Now I've written a little local program to check those feeds, throw new video URLs at yt-dlp, and I barely even go on the actual site any more. I'm sure they'll take away RSS at some point though

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I just re-set-up Pipeline in Linux. I'll probably still end up using the YouTube website since it's more convenient still. Pipeline imports your subscriptions feed and displays a grid like the official UI, but it doesn't currently support having multiple tabs or windows open.

[–] fort_burp@feddit.nl 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does your yt-dlp work over VPN? I feel like if I don't have a residential IP I can't watch YouTube at all, let alone use yt-dlp.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

Seem to tempban ips via login gating after a dozen or so downloads.

[–] WokePalpatine@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Would like to hear recommendations from users here on apps that do this or similar automation here. Would be nice to get off of YouTube, at least for subscription stuff. I'll have to start bookmarking videos in playlists or something too at some point, probably.

[–] GaryLeChat@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Newpipe on Android and if you want sponsor block, Tubular (fork of Newpipe with sponsor block). It doesn't try to anonymize you like invidious but I found invidious was too unreliable for how much i watch. Plus multiple users on my IP.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Newpipe and tubular have both been dead for me for a week or so :(

[–] Meltyheartlove@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago

invidious nadeko instance was down for a few days too but it is back

[–] GaryLeChat@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 weeks ago

New update is out for that, 0.28.2 :)

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Have you tried Pipepipe? It works for me.

https://pipepipe.dev/

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

I haven't yet! Tha ks for the recco

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

I have Pinchflat running on my home server. I use it for downloading audio of videos I want to listen to while driving to work.

https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The worst part of "new" YouTube is shorts. They stick them everywhere, all up in your face, and they suck. Even with Invidious they're hard to avoid.

I use an extension to remove shorts, it works on Invidious and YouTube, but it works off of their thumbnails. Unfortunately, a number of shorts don't have normal looking thumbnails, and don't get filtered, but it works good enough for me. Not good enough for Invidious to build it in, but still, good enough.

[–] LaGG_3@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

YouTube shorts in a nutshell:

dead-dove-1

dead-dove-2

dead-dove-3

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

shorts all have the shorts url why aren't we blocking on that basis?

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago

In Invidious shorts have the same URL as shorts. I only use Invidious.

I'm sure there's some userscript that blocks on YouTube proper with that method, but idk.

[–] Hermes@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I use ublock to remove all the shorts sections, but that seems like a better choice.

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

i like both. cleaner UI and i don't see that shit if some philistine posts a shorts link and i don't take the time to hover and check the status bar

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

The Pipeline app for Linux has an option to hide any video less than a minute long.

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In many ways, YouTube sucks.

They're where video makers can make money though, so it's where videos are posted, so we largely just have to live with them. I exclusively use Invidious though, which makes it a lot more reasonable, though far from perfect.

YouTube also has an insane usership. Unlike a lot of social media, it's not just young people, it's all ages, toddlers to elderly. And with young people, basically all of them use it. More than 99.5% percent of American teens regularly use YouTube.

[–] Spongebobsquarejuche@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago

It’s invaluable though, because of the ppl that have posted how to replace the timing chain on an 93’ Corolla.

[–] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Is video hosting really that expensive, or is it the streaming part that's expensive? If there was an alternative where you had to download the video locally to watch it, would it still cause bandwidth issues? Even for those of us with the least possible attention span, I think waiting to download a video before you watch it is better than 3 90-second unskippable ads.

[–] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago (4 children)

storage is cheap, delivery is the expensive part

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 19 points 1 month ago

I think storage is still pretty expensive. It's cheaper than it used to be, but hosting unlimited hours of video indefinitely is not cheap. Especially if it isn't done by someone that owns the disks themselves (paying for cloud storage), and colocation is a pretty hurdle that I can't imagine being done as a non-profit.

[–] HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 month ago

Storage ~~is~~ was cheap

Unfortunately 😢

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago

For an individual video and such, it is very cheap. But YouTube operates at such a massive scale that storage makes up an enormous amount of their expenses. Unlike most companies, payroll is actually a tiny fraction compared to even just storage.

A big part of why alternatives don't exist is just how expensive storage is. It's why open source video systems have barely any public instances.

Other social media video places get around this by having short form videos, so they can store a lot of videos cheap. YouTube has a lot of really long videos, in addition to their short videos.

[–] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Even with newer video compression? If your device just had to decompress the local video wouldn't that help? Sorry, it's been a while since I've been up to date on this stuff because looking into tech spaces is like peering into a portal to hell

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

There's just an enormous amount of content, and an enormous amount of users. Even with fancy video compression, it's incredibly, wildly expensive. Afaik it still isn't profitable, nowhere near profitable even with premium and all the ads, it's basically subsidized by Google.

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

it might be profitable if they enumerated all the datamining they get from it, but there's a variety of reasons to operate at technically a loss

[–] GiorgioBoymoder@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

my understanding is that video files are always in their compressed state, and have been since video compression has existed. i.e. it's always the local machine that's decoding the file. that said modern video compression is quite impressive (e.g. the change from h264 to h265), but upgrading all of YT to state of the art codecs is a significant amount of compute, and removing older files might create compatibility issues for users on older HW.

[–] fox@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

Your device receives a stream of compressed video data and decompresses and renders it on the fly. The tech is called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Small chunks are streamed at a time so the server isn't wasting resources sending the entire video file, based on the bandwidth available, desired resolution, and so on. It's why a YouTube video will never fully buffer, it's just sending the next few seconds and then waiting until it needs to send more.

Video is also really expensive. If we were still watching 360p videos it'd be fine, but as computers get more powerful and video serving becomes cheaper, we demand more. 60fps video. 4k video. VR video. And all videos must be stored forever and must start loading in a few seconds max, which means you can't use tape to archive cheaply.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it's not expensive, people want treats in two clicks instead of dicking around with fintube/tubearchivist for couple of hours and then ~~forgetting about it~~ dicking every three months when something breaks

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

the gui is a treat we should all go back to command line

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

i mean jellyfin with plugged-in youtube rss downloaders is not that different from nice gui, only without for you sections, adds, login to verify etc. the annoying part is, on tvs, you can't easily have two clients for two different servers bu eh, small steps.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That'd piss off a lot of people... but what's more shocking for some, I'm sure, is the amount of "terminal junkies" out there who already have and very much want the rest of us to as well.

ⓘ This user is suspected of being a bear. Please report any suspawcious behaviour.

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think ad block can still get YouTube ads, and Invidious also basically blocks YouTube ads.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I had to switch to uBlock Origin Lite recently, and it works just as well on youtube as the full version did.

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

FireFox, FireFox with custom user.js, any FireFox forks, basically any Chrome forks, they all can use the much better uBlock Origin.

The Lite version isn't better in any way, there's only downsides. It doesn't have like less code or whatever for being "Lite", the main thing is that it is severely limited on the number of websites and ad providers it can work on. It also has limitations on how adblocking works, on the places it does adblock.

But you're right, YouTube is a massive site, so it's on the list, and the tech they develop for the original for YouTube works on the Lite version too.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

For sure, but luckily there's zero difference between the two for what I'm using my laptop for. If someone had switched without me knowing I probably wouldn't even have noticed.

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

use one of the reskin chromes instead of actual chrome and the 100% real sugar ublock origin still works.

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

Downloading a video locally is more bandwidth intensive than streaming (they're the same if you watch the whole video, but if you're streaming and quit halfway through, that's only half the size).

Storage is cheap if you're some sort of curated thing like Netflix or a small service hosting just the videos for your blog. It's phenomenally expensive if you're doing what YouTube does and letting anyone upload as much as they want permanently.

Bandwidth for a small thing (blog) isn't horrible until something goes viral, then you have a choice between your site slowing to a crawl until it's unusable (traditional hosting), suddenly going dark (cloud with a spending limit), or suddenly costing an arm and a leg (cloud).