Avoiding YouTube’s algorithm

I’m still trying to spend less time watching YouTube, and the trick mentioned in this earlier post has been really good. I’ve actually gone one step further now, and I’m pleasantly surprised with how well it (usually) works.

I mentioned it a little at the bottom of the previous post, but what I do, instead of subscribing to a channel on YouTube, I subscribe that that channel’s RSS feed in Reeder. Then I browse the videos within Reeder. If something looks interesting, I then save it to Instapaper.

What’s cool is that (usually) I can watch the video in Instapaper directly, and it’s probably thanks to some ad-blocker or another, but I don’t even seem to get ads before/after/during the video either. Sometimes it doesn’t work and you see an error box instead of the video. Sometimes redownloading the ‘article’ fixes this. Sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s not perfect, but I now have a method to watch YouTube without even really going on YouTube