Video Brawl

Why it is fetched this way: quota. The YouTube Data API allows 10,000 quota units a day, and the endpoints are priced very unevenly — search.list costs 100 units per call, playlistItems.list costs 1. So search.list is used nowhere here. Each channel is resolved once to its uploads playlist id, which is cached permanently, and every poll after that just reads that playlist. At 10 channels refreshed every 6 hours that is roughly 44 units a day, about 0.44% of the free tier. The same channels polled through search.list would cost 4,000 units a day.

Fetched data is refreshed or deleted within 30 days, which YouTube's terms require. A video that is missing from several consecutive fetches — deleted or made private upstream — is removed from the database outright, which is why no dead links accumulate here.

A few things the YouTube terms require: every video links to its watch page on youtube.com; thumbnails are hotlinked from the official i.ytimg.com URLs and are never downloaded or re-hosted on this site; and video titles and channel names are shown exactly as the API returns them, never edited, translated or shortened.

Changing the list: the channels live in src/data/youtube-channels.ts, which opens with step-by-step instructions. Adding one means copying a block and changing the channel's @handle and region tag; removing one means deleting the block, and its videos are cleaned out on the next refresh.