Following YouTube Reddit and Medium with RSS Feeds

Most people think of RSS as a tool for blogs and news sites. You find a tech blog you enjoy, grab the feed URL, and suddenly you have a steady stream of articles arriving in your reader. That is the classic use case, and it works well. But RSS has always been capable of more than that. The underlying protocol is just a way to distribute structured content, and plenty of platforms beyond traditional blogs can expose their content through RSS feeds if you know where to look.

YouTube is probably the best example. Every channel has an RSS feed, though YouTube does not exactly advertise this fact. If you visit any YouTube channel and look at the page source, or simply construct the URL yourself, you can find the feed endpoint. The format looks something like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID. Once you have that channel ID, which you can extract from the channel’s about page or URL, you can subscribe to their uploads just like any other feed.

In Stratum, this shows up as a regular feed entry, but each item includes the video thumbnail and title. The difference is that instead of linking to a blog post, it links to a YouTube video. This means you can mix video content with text content in the same reader, following creators across platforms without needing to open the YouTube app or website. The youtube player feature in Stratum lets you watch videos directly without leaving your reader, which keeps your attention focused on the content rather than the platform.

The benefit of doing this through RSS rather than subscribing on YouTube itself is control. When you subscribe to a channel on YouTube, the algorithm decides what you see. It might highlight a video from three weeks ago because it thinks you will engage with it, or it might bury new uploads in favor of recommended content from similar channels. With an RSS feed, you see every upload in chronological order. Nothing is hidden, nothing is deprioritized. You get the full picture of what a creator is producing, and you can decide for yourself what deserves your time.

Reddit works similarly, though the mechanism is slightly different. Reddit has long supported RSS feeds for subreddits, user profiles, and even specific search queries. The URL structure is straightforward: https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/.rss gives you the top posts from a subreddit, while https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/.rss shows you a user’s post history. You can also filter by hot, new, or rising by adjusting the URL parameters.

This opens up some interesting possibilities. Instead of browsing Reddit directly and getting pulled into endless scrolling, you can curate a selection of subreddits that genuinely interest you and read them alongside your other feeds. The reddit galleries feature in Stratum handles multi-image posts gracefully, displaying them in a way that is easy to browse without needing to open each post individually.

Medium presents a different challenge because the platform has moved away from its earlier openness to RSS. Many writers on Medium have personal blogs elsewhere, and those blogs usually offer RSS feeds. But for content that lives exclusively on Medium, you need to work a bit harder. The platform does expose some RSS endpoints, though they are not always obvious. A user’s profile page often has a feed URL that includes their latest publications, and individual publications sometimes offer their own feeds as well.

The trick with Medium is to be selective. Since the platform’s recommendation engine works hard to keep you engaged with content similar to what you have already read, using RSS to follow specific writers or publications gives you a way to bypass that curation. You see what those writers publish, in the order they publish it, without Medium inserting its own suggestions into the mix.

One thing I have noticed while setting up feeds from these platforms is that the quality of the RSS experience varies considerably. YouTube feeds are reliable and include rich metadata like thumbnails and video duration. Reddit feeds work well but sometimes require additional processing to extract the full content of posts, especially when they include embedded media or complex formatting. Medium feeds are the least consistent, with some working perfectly and others requiring fallback mechanisms to grab the full text.

This is where automatic readability features become important. When an RSS feed only provides a summary or excerpt, having a reader that can automatically fetch and parse the full article content means you do not miss anything. In Stratum, the auto readability feature handles this transparently. You see the feed item, and if it lacks full content, the reader fetches it for you without requiring any manual intervention.

The broader point here is that RSS is not limited to traditional blogs. Any platform that publishes content on a regular basis can be followed through RSS if you are willing to find the right feed URLs. YouTube channels, Reddit communities, Medium publications, newsletters, podcasts, even some social media accounts. The feed becomes a single place where all of this content arrives, sorted by publication date, without any algorithm deciding what you should see first.

There is something quietly powerful about this approach. Instead of opening five different apps to check on your favorite creators, you open one reader and see everything that has been published since you last checked. The chronological ordering means nothing slips through the cracks. A small YouTube channel you follow might post a video that gets buried in the algorithm, but in your RSS reader it appears right alongside everything else, given equal weight and attention.

Setting this up takes a bit of initial effort. You need to find the feed URLs, which sometimes requires digging through documentation or inspecting page source. You might need to experiment with different formats to get the full content you want. But once the feeds are in place, the maintenance is minimal. The content arrives on its own schedule, and you read it on yours.

I keep coming back to this model because it respects my time and attention in ways that platform-native apps do not. There are no infinite scrolls, no autoplaying videos, no notification badges designed to create urgency. Just a list of content from sources I have chosen, presented in the order it was published, ready to be read or watched when I have the time and interest. It is a small shift in how you consume content, but it adds up over time.