#Seriously fuck youtube though. This is how you de-program the algorithim.

[modestbirdwizard]

De-Program The Algorithm: RSS is good and you should be using it.

Escape the algorithm, tune your feed and save the world; or, even though it's old and ugly, RSS can make your life better.

We live in a time of algorythmic feeds that distort our perceptions of events, time, and the people that we care about. Non-stop, hardwired access by large corporations into the pleasure centers of our brains have disrupted human congnition to the point where many wonder how we ever found content we liked without having it served up by angelic machines that live in the cloud, accessing us via the little magic boxes that live in our pockets.

There IS a way out of it, though, and it comes from before Web 1.0. It is called RSS, or Real Simple Syndication.

A more thorough explanation under the jump!

In the even older times, Syndication was a word used by old media to describe an article or show that they'd gotten from somewhere else, and were presenting as content to their own viewers. Star Trek, Garfield, and millions of other comics, stories, TV shows found success not in their initial markets, but in the long running and carefully tuned presentation of existing backlogs to interested audiences.

While syndication was previously a method of showing old content to new audiences, RSS is primarily a method of displaying new content in a feed to an audience of one, or a few. You can set your RSS up to have as much or as little content as you wish, mindlessly scraping vast quantities of podcasts and articles, or as a carefully pruned garden, where each entry lives or dies by the pleasure it brings you.

You can even put porn on it. And webcomics.

Youtube is compatible, which means you could bypass any artificial limiting our curation of your subscription tab with it. Tumblr blogs can be RSS feeds as well, as well as most wordpress sites. RSS is usually a defacto afterthought in this day and age, but sites like twitter don't work natively (Thanks Elon).

Really, the biggest killer for me is that I can create not just a video subscription feed that actually shows all of my subscriptions, I can even create several feeds of content based on genre or subject. No longer will my miniature painting videos be swept away in a tide of tech reviews or drama alerts!

There are self hosted options if you have a server or an unemployed raspberry pi, but for the general user, I highly recommend browser plugins like Feedbro, or apps like Feedly. Many of them have paid features now, but don't be fooled. There is always a free way to get your feed set up, and Feedbro works on mobile anyway. Sadly, this isn't something that firefox can sync, but at least you can export your desktop feed and import it on mobile.