Endgame Viable

I learned something about YouTube channels in RSS readers this morning.

tl;dr Add YouTube channels to InoReader with the channel’s url, not the channel’s RSS feed url, to preserve descriptions.

I’ve long known that every YouTube channel has an RSS feed associated with it, and I’ve used it in my Endgame Viable Firehose feed for years. If you don’t know, the “firehose” is an aggregation of my blog and my YouTube channel combined.

However, my YouTube channel feed in InoReader has had blank descriptions for a long time. At one point in the past, I remember seeing descriptions, but they disappeared and I never understood why.

Now I do.

I happened to notice Zelibeli from Blaugust 2026 went live with a Minecraft stream, and it showed up in InoReader with a prominent “live” tag. That’s neat, I thought. I’ve never seen a livestream show up in an RSS reader like that before.

Now that the livestream is over, Zelibeli’s video shows up in InoReader as a standard YouTube video, just like my YouTube videos do, and any other blog post with a YouTube embed does. Except theirs has a description, while mine doesn’t.

That’s really neat, I thought. How are they doing that?

Well, it turns out I was supposed to have used my channel’s url when adding it to InoReader, instead of the channel’s RSS feed url. The YouTube video descriptions are embedded in media:description tags instead of standard summary or content tags, so if you just add the RSS feed url, InoReader doesn’t know how to fetch the descriptions. When you add the YouTube channel url directly, it detects it as a YouTube channel and specially processes it.

So I re-added my YouTube channel to InoReader using the main channel url and voila, the descriptions re-appeared.

Neato.

I’m really glad to have stumbled on this blog post topic this morning so I could avoid talking about my health or AI controversy again.