Tell HN: YouTube have discontinued email notifications

6 points by jamieweb 5 years ago | 4 comments

I just logged on to my email to find no YouTube notifications for the past 12 hours, which is very rare/unusual.

It turns out that they have discontinued the feature, with little to no notice for users: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en

As some one who relies on these emails and reads every single one, this is terrible...

Does anyone have any ideas for an alternative? RSS hardly seems ideal and is clunky for dozens of channel subscriptions. The YouTube front page also regularly misses stuff, especially from smaller channels.

brudgers 5 years ago |

The YouTube front page also regularly misses stuff, especially from smaller channels.

Changes to the level of service to delivering subscribed content are probably what is driving it. My "subscribed" feed has been flakey for the past month. Videos come and go and on mobile, there's no longer infinite scroll. Stuff has been falling off the end after about two weeks.

I suspect Google would rather have everyone turn on device notifications for each of their channels.

In fairness people are probably hammering Youtube due to the Pandemic and something besides adding infrastructure probably needed doing.

jamieweb 5 years ago |

For those who've ended up here, my solution for now is to use Feedly.

edanm 5 years ago | |

How?

jamieweb 5 years ago | | |

Feedly lets you 'subscribe' to YT channels, so you can see all of the uploads in your Feedly feed.

Just search for a channel when adding a source. If it doesn't come up, paste in a direct link to the channel homepage and it'll find it.