Show HN: FreshTube – show latest videos from YouTube channels

My YouTube process must be very corner case. I usually keep an eye on subscriptions during the day and add the videos I want to watch to watch later and then order them a special way. House and trailers first, entertainment, fitness and then music. I have a separate watch later for the gym that I curate in a similar order for long treadmill runs. And that gets downloaded to the phone.

I do this every day. YouTube’s changing interface designs usually make this harder and harder.

Being able to order by channel groups would actually help this but I usually watch via AppleTV app in the evening.

Apparently very few people use watch later and order intentionally. Just two actions to corner case myself.

imglorp · 2 years ago

Check out NewPipe. It sorts all your subs by date, lets you make your own play lists, and can also download.

geerlingguy · 2 years ago

I do the exact same thing and couldn't imagine using YouTube another way.

YouTube sometimes hides the watch later option, which is getting annoying (it only shows up at certain screen widths now on non-app), but I can usually find a way (even if I have to resort to emailing the URL, then later dropping it in a wider browser window on my desktop.

(Only difference is I actually drag longer videos towards the top of the list since they can sit there a while until I get a few minutes to actually watch them).

kbenson · 2 years ago

The problem I've always had is making it habit. I've created different play lists and added videos to them and watch later, but forget about them and then notice weeks later I have stuff in my watch later list I never watched.

Put another way, I find adding to watch later easy, but I find remembering there's stuff there to watch very hard. I'm sure YouTube could make this much easier, but I doubt they view intentional watching as better than stumbling through random stuff for hours.

vallode · 2 years ago

How many minutes/hours a day do you spend curating your subscriptions? This sounds fairly exhausting looking at it throughout the day, every day. Surely you'd be able to achieve the same effect curating your subscriptions at the end of the day, or even end of the week.

browningstreet · 2 years ago

It's literally minutes, not a big deal, but I also curate content for my child around shared interests. Youtube has channels and playlists and barely wants you to use them.

Dead Comment

Mostly offtopic: This reminds me of the LiveJournal page where you could view all the latest images uploaded to that site. It was a mix of everything from news to porn and gave a small insight into the zeitgeist. It was also voyeuristic, and to this almost 50 year old it seems similar to the endless-refresh consumption of tiktok.

The web was definitely much, much smaller back then. You couldn't do something similar with any of the large social media sites, although maybe a small random sampling would work. I wonder if part of the perceived ills of social media are due to the sheer scale of it all? It's impossible to be "caught up" with anything anymore, there's always another trillion gallons pouring out of the firehose. Perhaps that's partly why HN endures, it stays small?

noman-land · 2 years ago

During the Small Web days it was possible to get "caught up" because the web was mostly niche. Now that the web encompasses most of society it's not possible to get "caught up" in the same way. You simply can't know about everything.

The Overwhelming Web requires the opposite strategy from FOMO. It requires aggressive pruning, unsubscribing, and careful curation of attention.

The niche underground nerdery has turned into a tidal wave of mainstream bullshit and trying to get "caught up" on that is the trap of the generation.

rafabulsing · 2 years ago

I like the phrasing of "The Overwhelming Web"! Quick Googling shows no other similar uses, did you just come up with it?

mbirth · 2 years ago

I remember some TED talk or some other tech talk where the presenter mentioned a Flickr stream of all newly uploaded photos. As you could only set the permissions after uploading photos, often, some private photos and scanned documents would appear in that stream for a few minutes.

Decabytes · 2 years ago

My strategy is just to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/ with the regex R:^https://www.youtube.com/$ and redirect that to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

With this strategy, I've often seen videos from my favorite YouTubers within minutes of them posting a new video. It also allows me to "finish" watching YouTube for the day.

figgyc · 2 years ago

I think you've linked the wrong "Block Site" extension, at least I couldn't find regex blocking or redirecting in that one, but this one has it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/block-website...

nullandvoid · 2 years ago

My version of this is news feed eradicator extension (to block any algorithmic sections on YT), plus ublock origin to block shorts element shown in subscriptions.

nobrains · 2 years ago

How is it different from YouTube subscriptions page? As I understand it will hide any old ones since last refresh compared to the YT subs page which will show all.

(I need something like this for Hacker News)

pgorczak · 2 years ago

The subscriptions page can’t be filtered to show some subset/group of channels. I use PocketTube as a plugin-based alternative.

thanksgiving · 2 years ago

I am not a fan of the “upcoming” or scheduled videos. I wish there was a way to remove shorts and upcoming videos from my subscription page on YouTube.

ireadmevs · 2 years ago

For HN I like to use https://hckrnews.com/

It doesn’t hide old entries, but clearly divide them.

manuelmoreale · 2 years ago

Not the same but since YouTube still has RSS support you can add your favorite channels to an rss reader and get notified about new videos (and unfortunately also shorts)

dewey · 2 years ago

Having no way to filter shorts is such a weird behavior. Especially on the TV apps…where portrait format video makes even less sense.

nntwozz · 2 years ago

You can filter out shorts with Yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee and Invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious.

throw7 · 2 years ago

for shorts i use youtube-shorts block. the key thing is it plays it as a normal video, but you can also block/hide shorts.

jraph · 2 years ago

Yep! That's what Invidious uses. That's what I use to subscribe to channels. The main view does not separate shorts from normal videos neither though. I guess some could implement this in the future.

thomashabets2 · 2 years ago

I wrote https://github.com/ThomasHabets/yurate and use it daily to triage new videos from channels I subscribe to.

It uses a playlist (to triage into) and google drive's application specific storage (so not access to other google drive files) for state, so is entirely client side.

Usable here: https://cement.retrofitta.se/tmp/yt/yt.html

bloopernova · 2 years ago

bbstats · 2 years ago

How is this better than subscriptions? (Genuinely asking)

stevethomas · 2 years ago

Slightly tangential to this but I also use https://getstarmaker.com/spark to discover really fresh videos with low subscriber count.

JoshTriplett · 2 years ago

Interesting metric. What are some videos that you found that way and consider worth watching?