Messing with Play and YouTube subscriptions

Play 2.0 just got released with a new channels feature.

It’s behind a subscription, but you can try it for seven days.

I started using Play as a replacement for YouTube’s Watch Later list (and for other sites too, like Vimeo).

YouTube is an attention magnet, and I want to avoid it when possible.

Using the Watch Later feature makes this more hard.

Play keeps me out of the YouTube app, mostly…

I also follow YouTube channels using RSS from Reeder instead of the YouTube app.

This way, I have an integrated workflow of browsing videos, blog posts, Mastodon posts, etc.

I’m also trying to give minimal data to Google through YouTube other than my watch history.

I have watch history turned off, but I’m sure Google still tracks it.

Because of this workflow, it seems redundant to use Play to subscribe to the same list of YouTube channels.

I added my list of channels to Play anyway to test the Channels feature.

It was a bit annoying since Play has no Shortcuts integration for managing channels or OPML import.

I don’t have a conclusion on the usefulness of this feature for me yet, but I’ll test it in the following week, and we will see if I keep the subscription or not.