May 4, 2026 
In case you haven't caught on yet, some of us will just never be interested in being manipulated by those brain-rotting, never-ending homepage feeds you love shoving in our faces the moment we log in.
We would rather use the feeds you offer for each of your channels. You know, the ones you're hiding? The feeds we can subscribe to in our own feed reader to follow our favorite creators without having to be on your platform at all?
Well, your relationship with these feeds has gone from neglectful to borderline hostile, and we're tired of pretending otherwise.
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Your feeds keep disappearing
](#your-feeds-keep-disappearing)
Let's start with the fact that when using your feeds in a feed reader, they're unreliable. Users have been reporting for a while now that their feeds either go silent without warning or vanish altogether. No announcement, no error message, no explanation. Just... gone.
And sometimes they're out of commission for so long that people genuinely think you've just said "screw it" and axed them.
Is it a bug? Probably. Is a fix being prioritized? That's a harder question to answer. But when a platform your size lets something like this slide, it stops feeling like an oversight and starts feeling like a choice.
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Hiding your feeds in plain sight
](#hiding-your-feeds-in-plain-sight)
Another thing that annoys us: you make no effort to surface the link to these feeds. When visiting a YouTube channel, there's no link to follow it in a feed reader, no "add feed" button, nothing.
Instead, we're stuck trying to glue together a channel's feed from a bunch of jumbled letters and symbols like channel/UC4a-GbYw7vOacCHmFo40b9g, a hot, garbled mess that's unmemorable and clearly not designed for human beings.
It's sad to see when you compare that to the early web, when feeds were a first-class citizen and sites like yours wore their feed links at the top of their pages like a badge.
We just don't get it. You have the infrastructure and every opportunity to let people subscribe to your feeds in a feed reader with a single click. But you keep choosing not to. It's like you just don't want us to use them.
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Nobody asked for shorts in their feed
](#nobody-asked-for-shorts-in-their-feed)
Apparently somewhere down the line, you've begun a multi-year mission to become another TikTok, and that's fine, platforms evolve. But when that mission starts bleeding into the feeds of users who don't want it, it becomes a big problem.
Shorts are showing up in feeds whether we want them or not, and we've tried to express how much we don't want it as politely as possible (How many ways can we say "Not interested"?), but there they are.
When we subscribe to feeds in our feed readers, it's intentional. So if we add a feed to specifically follow the channel's full-length, higher quality video content, that's what we want to see. Shorts are the opposite of that. They're impulse content, designed for infinite scroll, not for a feed reader. And mixing the two isn't just annoying, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of what feeds are for.
So feel free to chase TikTok. But it should be okay if some of us don't wanna be dragged along for the ride.
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There's a much bigger problem at play
](#theres-a-much-bigger-problem-at-play)
Sadly, you're not the only platform letting their feeds rot. It's part of a broader pattern across the web where large platforms like yours have subtly, over time, made their feeds less visible and harder to use.
Why? Because offering feeds that can be used in feed readers lets us follow our favorite content without having to log in and constantly check your platforms. It gives us control. It removes your algorithms and the ability to manipulate us. It doesn't let you decide what we see and when, and that's bad for those fancy engagement metrics and ad revenue you all love so much.
Unfortunately, you're not unique in this. But you are one of the few platforms that still offers feeds that can be used in feed readers. So even if you're trying to make us forget they exist, we can't be too hard on you. You haven't removed them... yet.
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Our feeds will be here even if yours aren't
](#our-feeds-will-be-here-even-if-yours-arent)
Here's the thing: the technology behind the feeds we use in our feed readers has outlasted every platform that ever tried to make it irrelevant.
It survived when Google killed its feed reader while trying to take the entire technology down with it. It survived the rise of social media timelines. It even survived the podcast industry trying to wall off its own open ecosystem (looking at you, Spotify).
So your indifference is just the latest chapter in a long, boring story we've all read before. But if you're going to offer feeds, make sure they actually work. And if not, guess we'll have to keep trying to do it for you.
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