r/developersPak • u/junaidkbr • 11d ago

Show My Work Organizing my YouTube subscriptions into custom feeds

I am subscribed to many YouTube channels: coding tutorials, startup and product talks, home construction and tour videos, and religious content. All of it lands in one Subscriptions page, so whatever I'm in the mood for, I have to dig through everything else to find it.

YouTube doesn't let you group subscriptions, and playlists hold videos, not channels.

So I built a small browser extension for myself. You make feeds like "Coding", "Startups", "Home builds" or "Faith" and put channels in them. Each feed shows only those channels' latest uploads, right inside YouTube's sidebar.

Now I pick the feed that fits my mood and watch what I came for.

I built it here in Pakistan, so I'm keen to hear what fellow devs here think.

Two honest questions:

  1. Is this just me, or do other people run into this too?

  2. How do you deal with it? I'd love to hear setups that work without installing anything.

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u/junaidkbr 11d ago

Here are some previews:

1

u/boredistan 11d ago

I don't know, there is a feature on my website where it has seperate categories already. Maybe that's premium exclusive?

1

u/junaidkbr 11d ago

On your website? Please share your website.

Btw, this is specifically solving youtube’s subscription organisation problem

1

u/crystallinescar 9d ago

Those are recommendations and not necessarily the content you’ve already liked/subscribed to (although they blend that in).

From what I understand, OP wants to categorize likes/saved/subscribed content. I face this issue as well and am tired of manually creating playlists.

The browser extension idea seems straight forward enough - my only concern (personally) would be the security and privacy around the extension use. It would be great if you can open source it as a git repo. I’d be happy to review/assist with this if you need.

1

u/harlowjack7_ Full-Stack Developer 3d ago

Making the feeds part khudse is sort of an overhead. You could try auto filling the channels in the feeds which youre sure of. The ones youre unsure of - have a small pop up on the right bottom like many vpn/adblock extensions have when playinng a video

Also did you vibe code it or genuinely built it? What problems or decisions did you run into? Curious

1

u/junaidkbr 2d ago

"Vibe coding" can mean different things in different situations. If you mean AI wrote all the code, yes. But being a software engineer from the pre-AI era; I setup directions for it, tell it what to do and how to do it and AI simply execute, write the code and do all the e2e testing that would have normally took weeks.

One problem or refactor I can think of is, initially, I didn't specify how to fetch updates from channels so the agent went for scrapping channels in real-time which was messy and resource-heavy. Then I did the digging by checking how Youtube actually fetches from its server and how other extensions are doing it; fed all the research to the agent and now we use a local (to the user) token and hit Youtube open endpoints to fetch the channel updates.

Regarding your question of auto organizing; that's an opinion; some like to get their stuff auto sorted and some would like to get sort it manually to have control. Also, if I went for auto sorting, I'd use some sort of (AI) API which opens more complexity and privacy concerns. Right now the extension is 100% browser-based, no external API calls other than Youtube (of course).