YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

146 points - today at 1:15 AM

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Comments

dawidpotocki today at 5:19 AM
I see people are doing scripts or other things to remove shorts from their feeds, but there is a simpler solution.

Take your RSS URL of a channel, e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxSGC9B...

Replace the `channel_id` with `playlist_id` and replace `UC` with `UULF`. This prefix will only list normal videos:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFxSG...

krembo today at 6:17 AM
My pet project is showing Youtube feeds nicely, along with other rss feeds, twitter feeds and searches and telegram channels. I've been working on it for the past year, still in beta, but I'd love to get feedbacks: https://aggly.com
qmarchi today at 4:40 AM
> Access to feeds from this network are restricted due to continued abuse of the service, which brings down the performance of feeds for everyone else. You'll need to use a verification token or use a different network to restore access

Ahh, good to know that my regular ISP got banned for something I have no clue about. Can't even read the blog.

renegat0x0 today at 5:59 AM
I already complained about post on reddit. It says that link to RSS is hidden, which is not true IMHO.

YouTube page contains HTML link to RSS feed in channel page, and most RSS clients should just pick it up just fine.

By the way I maintain a list of feeds, many of them are youtube in link below, so if you would like to find a channel you can use it

Links:

h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds

bronlund today at 4:54 AM
I use a script to read the feed which then checks every video against https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID. If it loads (200), it's a Short.

Stupid, but it works.

ajdude today at 4:09 AM
> Nobody asked for shorts in their feed

This has been a big issue for me. I currently use RSS exclusively to view the YouTube channels that I'm subscribed to -- currently about 75 channels (and 27 nebula channels) -- and over half of my YouTube feeds are filled with several shorts (sometimes multiple ones by the same creator per day).

Looking for hashtags in the title and marking those videos as read is essentially muscle memory at this point.

zelphirkalt today at 11:02 AM
RSS feeds broken, player broken, buffering broken, idiotic ads if you don't uBlock Origin the hell out of it ... I think the only thing they didn't yet ruin-bloat is content, because that's created by other people, but those people are also producing tons of trash and AI generated crap, so content is also broken. It is up to the visitor to filter out trash and find the few good contents amidst all the rubble. If today a competitor managed to gain significant amount of quality content and the ability to also deliver that content, YouTube would pretty soon be out of business, I think.
TonyTrapp today at 9:46 AM
Hush, don't remind them that they have RSS feeds, or they might remove them altogether.
rambambram today at 8:49 AM
I subscribe to feeds by just copying the human-readable url (right-click on the channel's title). When I embed the videos from these channels only the long videos are embedded, the shorts are not (has to do with a different url for shorts). So no problems here.

I do have a problem with old videos getting presented as new videos. Videos from weeks ago get a publication date of two days ago. Sometimes I just don't know - based on a thumbnail - if I've already seen the video.

rsanek today at 10:23 AM
Open RSS, your website is slow
spondyl today at 4:02 AM
Unfortunately, navigating to this page seems to display:

> Too many requests are being made from an unsupported application. This unfortunately degrades the experience and makes feeds slow for everyone else. Please try back later.

akpa1 today at 10:11 AM
My feed reader works by running once a day, at roughly the same time every day, and sending me an email of all of the things it's not seen before. Because of this I've not actually been able to get any output from the Youtube feeds for months because they always seem to be going down at about the same time of day. I didn't realise it was "only" intermittent.
zeta0134 today at 4:05 AM
I've been having some success by configuring my RSS reader with simple rules, like "please don't tell me about shorts" and "I don't care if this person is live right now." Too bad the real homepage shows three enormous thumbnails and pretty much exclusively the things I want to not see.
kebman today at 8:35 AM
Just make your own RSS feed?

Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...

zImPatrick today at 8:35 AM
this article hasn't been loading for me for about 3 hours, here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...
QuiDortDine today at 4:35 AM
It's been pretty obvious for a long time that Youtube doesn't want you to have an objective view of anything. It wants you to trust in the Algorithm to spoonfeed you content. Even the subscription page now displays some arbitrary shit first. I'm absolutely sick of it.
deleted today at 4:53 AM
NordStreamYacht today at 4:31 AM
This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.
eunice today at 7:11 AM
my feed reader gets a 404/500 regularly with youtube feeds but i just assumed they were using those error codes instead of 429 for some reason
verisimi today at 5:01 AM
Apparently, this guy doesn't get that RSS is a problem to Google, that they already tried to kill. Of course the neglect is by design. The only reason they keep RSS going is that there is a return on it and it does bring in users - such as me.
gsich today at 8:34 AM
When Youtube removed email notifications I had to build a RSS->email tool, I don't send mails for videos that have no duration (livestreams) and videos <1min.
imagetic today at 4:20 AM
Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.
antisol today at 10:05 AM
Well hi there chatgpt! I wonder if the person who couldn't be bothered writing this article actually had a point they wanted to make? I don't know because I stopped reading as soon as I recognised your fingerprint.
zarmin today at 6:15 AM
while we're complaining about this platform that desperately needs (but will never find) competition, it's fucked up that we can't access Watch History and Watch Later playlists via the api.
charcircuit today at 5:39 AM
>When visiting a YouTube channel, there's no link to follow it in a feed reader, no "add feed" button, nothing.

There is literally a bell which you can set it so all videos get sent to your notification feed.

>But when that mission starts bleeding into the feeds of users who don't want it, it becomes a big problem.

Most people love shorts. It had extremely fast growth and continues to get a ton of engagement. Not wanting to see shorts is a small minority. It is disingenuous to pretend that no one wanted shorts when engagement is though the roof with the product.

nicman23 today at 5:34 AM
youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol
tosti today at 5:40 AM
Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.
shevy-java today at 7:36 AM
Google itself is broken. Admittedly though, how many folks use RSS feeds? I never managed to get into it.
Dylan16807 today at 9:19 AM
> Nobody asked for shorts in their feed

> if we add a feed to specifically follow the channel's full-length, higher quality video content, that's what we want to see. Shorts are the opposite of that. They're impulse content, designed for infinite scroll, not for a feed reader

I'm officially asking for it.

On the channels I'm subscribing to, nothing is wrong with the shorts except the UI covering up part of the video. They're not lower quality, and while you could call a lot of them "impulsive", a lot of longer videos are also impulsive!

I feel like I live in an alternate world to most people because shorts seem resoundingly Fine to me. They have some advantages and disadvantages but overall it's on par with the rest of the site. Not some weird addictive slop feed.

chrismorgan today at 8:06 AM
I have a bone to pick with the edited title this was submitted under.

The article’s title is “YouTube, your feeds are broken”. The word “RSS” was added to the submission title. That’s factually incorrect: YouTube feeds are Atom, and have been since at least 2009. Even if they have from early days even to this day had a terrible habit of incorrectly labelling the <link rel="alternate"> tags with type="application/rss+xml" and title="RSS" or similar.

(I hate RSS. Awful thing, should have died more than twenty years ago. For all domains outside outside the benighted world of podcasting where Apple ruined things, Atom is the strictly better choice, and has been for full twenty years.)