My distraction free way of following channels on YouTube

My distraction free way of following channels on YouTube, is simply by subscribing to them via web feeds. It may sound boring, but this has actually been my workflow for almost a decade now¹.

And to make things even more boring: I have always used the same web feed client. This happens to be Newsboat. It’s an advanced text-based client, that’s highly customizable and distraction free.

I then use mpv and yt-dlp to watch the videos. mpv is a highly customizable, fully keyboard driven and distraction free media player. And it supports plugins! The tool yt-dlp, let you stream content from multiple websites.

One of the plugins—or scripts as they call it—that I use for mpv, is mpv_sponsorblock. It automatically lets me skip sponsored segments of YouTube videos. It uses the SponsorBlock backend. Which is an open source and crowdsourced browser extension. Users can submit when a sponsor happens, and the extension will then automatically skip the sponsored content for the rest of the users. It also supports skipping other categories, such as intros, outros and even reminders to subscribe.

The reason I don’t like using the web (youtube.com), or even clients like SmartTube for Android TV (even it’s a great client, that I personally use on my Android TV), is because I find the inbox workflow to be quite stressful.

I don’t have much time to spend on YouTube (which is partly by choice). This means that my inbox (or whatever it’s called), gets full of new videos, which pushes older videos further down in an endless list of unwatched videos.

With Newsboat, I can simply let my backlog of unwatched videos grow, with the piece of mind that they’ll always be there when I feel like watching some of it. The current backlog is 998 unwatched videos. Massive! I dare anyone to try to manage that backlog on YouTube.com.

Newsboat also supports something called query feeds. This let me create dynamic feeds from subscribed channels. As an example, I have one query feed with all unwatched videos, and another one that I call “Fresh Videos”, which list all videos that’s newer than 7 days. I have also created various categories for all my feeds, which makes it easy to list only a certain type of content.

I also get spared from all the terrible thumbnails! I really don’t get it why everyone has to include their faces (with some sensationalistic expression) in every single thumbnail. It doesn’t matter what the video is about… No offence, but I really don’t care about your face. It just makes me not want to watch the content at all.

Anyway. This is my distraction free way of following channels on YouTube. It’s not unique and it’s probably quite boring, but it what works for me.