YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

YouTube，你们的 RSS 订阅源坏了

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.

如果你还没意识到，我们中的一些人永远不会对那些令人“脑死亡”、无穷无尽的首页信息流感兴趣——而这正是你们在用户登录时强行塞给我们的东西。我们宁愿使用你们为每个频道提供的订阅源。没错，就是你们藏起来的那些。那些我们可以通过自己的阅读器订阅，从而在无需访问你们平台的情况下关注喜爱创作者的订阅源。说实话，你们对待这些订阅源的态度已经从“疏于管理”演变成了“近乎敌视”，我们厌倦了继续假装看不见。

Your feeds keep disappearing

你们的订阅源不断消失

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.

首先，当我们在阅读器中使用你们的订阅源时，它们非常不稳定。用户们反映，订阅源要么毫无预兆地停止更新，要么直接彻底消失。没有公告，没有错误提示，没有解释。就这么……没了。有时它们瘫痪的时间太长，以至于人们真的以为你们已经决定“去他的”并直接砍掉了这项功能。这是 Bug 吗？大概是。修复工作被优先处理了吗？这很难说。但当你们这样规模的平台对这种问题听之任之，这就不再像是疏忽，而更像是一种选择。

Hiding your feeds in plain sight

将订阅源藏在眼皮底下

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.

另一件让我们恼火的事是：你们根本不打算展示这些订阅源的链接。访问 YouTube 频道时，找不到任何在阅读器中关注的链接，没有“添加订阅”按钮，什么都没有。相反，我们只能被迫从一堆乱码中拼凑出频道的订阅地址，比如 channel/UC4a-GbYw7vOacCHmFo40b9g——这简直是一团糟，既难记又显然不是为人类设计的。对比互联网早期，那时订阅源是“一等公民”，像你们这样的网站会把订阅链接像勋章一样挂在页面顶部，现在的做法实在令人悲哀。我们真的不明白，你们拥有基础设施，完全有机会让用户一键订阅，但你们却选择不这样做。看起来，你们就是不想让我们使用它们。

Nobody asked for shorts in their feed

没人想在订阅源里看到 Shorts

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.

显然，在某个阶段，你们开启了一项长达数年的计划，试图成为下一个 TikTok，这没问题，平台总会进化。但当这一计划开始渗透到那些并不想要它的用户的订阅源中时，问题就大了。无论我们是否愿意，Shorts 总是出现在订阅源里。我们已经尽可能礼貌地表达了我们的反感（我们还能用多少种方式说“不感兴趣”呢？），但它们依然在那里。我们在阅读器中订阅频道是有意为之的。如果我们添加一个订阅源是为了专门关注频道的高质量长视频，那我们想看的就是这些。Shorts 与此背道而驰。它们是为无限滚动设计的冲动型内容，而不是为阅读器准备的。将两者混在一起不仅令人恼火，更是对订阅源本质目的的根本性误解。所以，你们尽管去追逐 TikTok，但请允许我们中的一些人不想被卷入其中。

There’s a much bigger problem at play

背后存在更大的问题

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.

遗憾的是，你们并不是唯一一个让订阅源“腐烂”的平台。这是整个互联网的一个普遍趋势：像你们这样的大型平台，随着时间的推移，都在潜移默化地让订阅源变得更隐蔽、更难用。为什么？因为提供可供阅读器使用的订阅源，让我们无需登录并不断刷新你们的平台就能关注喜爱的内容。这赋予了我们控制权，排除了你们的算法和操纵手段。这让你们无法决定我们何时看什么，而这对你们极其看重的那些华丽的参与度指标和广告收入来说是“坏事”。不幸的是，你们并非个例。但你们确实是少数几个仍然提供可供阅读器使用订阅源的平台之一。所以，即使你们试图让我们忘记它们的存在，我们也不能对你们太苛刻。毕竟，你们还没有彻底移除它们……至少目前还没有。

Our feeds will be here even if yours aren’t

即使你们的订阅源消失，我们的阅读器依然存在

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.

事实是：我们阅读器背后的技术已经熬过了每一个试图让它变得无关紧要的平台。当 Google 砍掉自己的阅读器并试图连带摧毁这项技术时，它活了下来；在社交媒体时间线兴起时，它活了下来；甚至在播客行业试图封闭其开放生态系统时（说的就是你，Spotify），它也活了下来。所以，你们的冷漠只不过是一个我们早已读过无数遍的冗长、无聊故事的最新篇章。但如果你们要提供订阅源，请确保它们真的能用。如果不行，看来我们只能继续尝试为你们代劳了。

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