How the social sites change their feeds
My extension shuts the feeds on seven sites, so it breaks quietly when one of them moves a feed or renames a page. Every day a script visits the same pages on each site, signed out, and writes down what it finds. When something changes for real, it lands in the log below with the date I first saw it.
Change log
Nothing has changed since I started watching. The table below is the starting point: when YouTube adds Shorts somewhere new, or Instagram starts asking you to log in before Reels, it shows up here first.
What I see today
15 of 23 pages loaded normally on the last check. The extension passed 14 of 16 of its own checks on the same sites. A bot check or a page that didn’t load is noted, never counted as a change.
| Page | Where it lands | On the page, signed out | Last check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homemy rules: feed | instagram.com/ | There: A login formNot there: Posts in the feed | Checked |
| Reelsmy rules: feed | instagram.com/reels/:id/ | There: Reels playingNot there: A login form | Checked |
| Exploremy rules: feed | instagram.com/explore/ | Not there: A login form; The Explore grid | Checked |
| A profilemy rules: content | instagram.com/accounts/login/login wall | There: A login formNot there: Posts on the profile | Checked |
| Page | Where it lands | On the page, signed out | Last check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homemy rules: feed | facebook.com/ | There: A login formNot there: Posts in the feed | Checked |
| Watchmy rules: feed | facebook.com/watch/ | There: A login formNot there: Videos in Watch | Checked |
| Reelsmy rules: feed | facebook.com/login.phplogin wall | There: A login formNot there: Reels playing | Checked |
YouTube
| Page | Where it lands | On the page, signed out | Last check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homemy rules: feed | youtube.com/ | There: The empty home with a search prompt; Shorts in the side menuNot there: The home grid of recommended videos; A Shorts shelf on the home page | Checked |
| Search resultsmy rules: content | youtube.com/results | There: Video results; A Shorts shelf in search results; Links to Shorts in search results | Checked |
| A video pagemy rules: content | youtube.com/watch | There: Recommended videos beside the playerNot there: Shorts beside the player; The video category tag (the extension reads it for lessons) | Checked |
| Shortsmy rules: feed | youtube.com/shorts/:id | There: The Shorts player | Checked |
TikTok
| Page | Where it lands | On the page, signed out | Last check |
|---|---|---|---|
| For Youmy rules: feed | tiktok.com/foryou | There: Videos in the For You feed; A login prompt | Checked |
| Exploremy rules: feed | tiktok.com/explore | There: The Explore grid; A login prompt | Checked |
| A profilemy rules: content | tiktok.com/@natgeo | Not there: Videos on the profile | Checked |
X / Twitter
How the check works
- A plain Chromium browser, with no extension and no account, opens each page above once a day and waits for it to settle.
- It writes down where the page ends up, whether it sends you to a login page, the page title, and whether each feed piece is there or not. It records “there” or “not there”, never a count, so 18 videos one day and 24 the next isn’t a change.
- A new value has to show up on two checks in a row before it counts. That keeps one-off experiments and slow pages out of the log.
- Sites often show a bot check to automated visitors. When that happens, the row says so and keeps the last real result. It never logs a change from a blocked visit.
- “My rules” is what my extension calls the address: a feed it shuts, or a page it leaves open. If a site moves a feed to an address my rules don’t know, this is where I find out.
More in the Feed Watch guide, or see which pages the extension shuts on each site.