I’ve noticed that my Youtube feed is not very good anymore. I have a diverse set of interests and I don’t spend much time curating the list of channels I’m subscribed to.

I’ve also come to dislike feeds themselves. It makes me feel like I need to check in on them every day lest I miss something that I wanted to see. This feeling is perfect for the attention economy but I despise it.

I want to be able to regulate my attention without missing out. If I want to check Youtube once per week or once per month, I want the confidence that I’m not going to miss anything.

One solution for this is the Inbox-Zero approach. The only problem is that there’s so much content on Youtube that you need tools for labeling and sorting through information so you can focus only on what you want.

For example, maybe I’m not in the mood to look at gardening videos. It should be trivial to filter those out of my feed to make sure that I’m focusing my attention on exactly what I intend.

It all starts with importing channels. You can connect to YouTube OAuth which will import all your subscriptions and keep them in sync with the inbox system so that you can delete channels and they will unsubscribe on Youtube for you.

Next, in the Channels list, you can select channels, delete them, tag them, or even “Autotag” them using AI to create tags for you.

Managing tags can be kind of a pain. When you’re managing 300+ channels, it’s a lot of work to categorize and consolidate. For example, “Libertarian Commentary” is not a very useful tag for me. So I’m just going to use the AI agent to help me reorganize some things.

And there you have it.

I think this system can generalize quite well. The sidebar populates some default inbox views for each tag, and you can further refine your filters if you want, for example, to hide Youtube Shorts which I often find myself wanting to do.