I recently decided to download a bunch of playlists using Stacher and host them on a local JellyFin instance, e.g. Stanford lectures for a bunch of classes like CS25 or CS326 I wanted to review. Whenever I find a link to an interesting YouTube video, I just download that way and put it on the server to watch later (have a single cmd line for that).

on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.

Yes any RSS reader works for this task.

There are two types of channel RSS feeds

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>

And the older

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username>

Youtube used to have an opml export button but there are a few github projects that convert the youtube subscription csv that dumps out of the account data export.

Edit: If you want to filter out shorts using the selfhosted application rssbridge allows you to do this.

I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.

I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P

Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.

Things like FreeTube and NewPipe let you keep a subscription list, even if you watch the videos elsewhere.

Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)

You could manage your subscriptions in an RSS reader, that's what I used to do. Each channel has multiple RSS feeds associated with it for different types of videos (live, vod, etc).

you can use lurkkit.com to build your own chronological youtube feed with only your subscriptions

That's ... exactly what the subscriptions feed does right now?

I know it's really really loud in your echo chamber but short form videos are extremely popular.

I made a little TUI last month for searching within a channel! It supports before: / after:, fuzzy/exact/regex matching, lets you order by upload date/views/duration, lets you search over just a video's titles or descriptions, etc: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse

The vast majority of my youtube watching is "go to a specific channel and try to find a certain kind of video" so it drives me nuts that youtube channel search is so bad (and afaik you can't search a channel on mobile?). I end up using my tool to find a bunch of videos and get them into my history to watch on my ipad.

n.b. my tool downloads all video metadata for a channel and then searches over it locally, so it's pretty slow the first time you search a channel (results are cached for 24 hours though).

> I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example.

Uh, yeah, they do.

https://www.youtube.com/@PuddleOfMuddTV/search?query=blurry

> Or search within transcripts.

Yeah, I also wish this were possible using the normal CTRL+F just doesn't work properly

You can search videos within a channel, go to the channel page and look for the magnifying glass all the way at the end of the nav bar that has

Home | Videos | Shorts | Playlists | Posts | *Magnifying glass here*

Well at least in browser its there, I can't find it on mobile for whatever reason.

It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.

...whose search engine has itself become noticeably less of a search engine and more of a recommendation/sheeple-herding engine over time.

One of the problems with YouTube seach is that they also stop showing you what you searched for after a couple of videos, instead you get the same crap you find on the homepage, which is bewildering.

You're basically right, it's just a UI for the old search filters, at least for the ones that still work today.

One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters, and to hide recommended videos + redirect the homepage to the subscriptions tab.

As long I doesn't shove "shorts" or "other people watched" in the result list, it's an improvement. Sometimes the results are so egregious and completely unrelated to the search terms that I feel like youtube wants to piss me off on purpose. I don't want to be searching some quantum physics video and get videos of some barely clothed women in Miami, I fail to see how it is related...

I think that it's a fair title - it takes the "hidden" search terms and brings them to the surface for users.

The (default) YouTube search is barely useful

They have made a search WITH the advanced features available

Everything as advertised (IMO)