In 2020, Thomas Brand wrote a blog post about finding a YouTube’s channel RSS feed by appending the channel’s “Channel ID” onto a feed URL.
In 2020 I am watching less stupid on YouTube by skipping the algorithm. Instead of letting the YouTube decide which videos it wants to show me, I am watching only the videos I want to see by subscribing to my favorite content creators via RSS.
First I find a YouTube channel I want to watch.
View its source code in my browser
Search for “channelid”
And append the Channel ID to the end of this URL
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=The combined URL + Channel ID is the Feed URL of that YouTube channel, and can be added to my feed reader.
Thanks to Thomas for showing us the way. My problem is that I change my subscriptions a lot on YouTube. So the view source method that Thomas describes is a bit cumbersome for me.
JavaScript to the rescue!
I’ve created a simple bookmarklet that, when tapped while you’re on a YouTube channel’s page, will forward you to the channel’s RSS feed. It does this by retrieving the Channel ID from the HTML source and forwarding you to the appropriate URL.
I’ve put the code on GitHub. If anyone would like to improve upon it, please do.