YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken(openrss.org)
114 pointsby veeti8 hours ago24 comments
  • dawidpotocki4 hours ago
    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...

    • jraph2 hours ago
      Thanks, I guess I can get rid of my cron task that marks shorts as read in Nextcloud News. How did you find out?
      • dawidpotocki2 hours ago
        I was annoyed one day and was looking online around for some solutions.

        You can find a bit more information here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...

        • jraph28 minutes ago
          Thanks!

          From your link:

          > However, this pattern was found by me by acquiring all playlists from "UUAA" to "UUZZ" and is not officially announced by YouTube.

          Okay, this was reverse engineered and there's no promise from Google on that :-)

          I wonder how they use these feeds if that's only internal.

  • rambambram9 minutes ago
    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.

  • krembo3 hours ago
    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
    • Esn024an hour ago
      Quite interesting, seems like something I would find useful. However, is there documentation or even an "About" page anywhere? Some info on which sites are supported and how to add them, as well as user limits? At least on mobile (which seems surprisingly nice, from what I can see), I don't see it.

      I do like the overall design and the customizability.

      EDIT: I found some info in the miniscule "Terms of Use" link at the bottom of the page when I clicked on the link to create a new account: https://aggly.com/terms

      And then I guessed at the url for pricing information by typing in aggly.com/pricing, which redirected me to: https://aggly.com/account (I don't know how to get there from the home page, though)

      I haven't found info on what "API access" is good for, though. Is there a description?

      Also, would there be any way to integrate paid SubStack subscriptions? (I admittedly haven't looked into this much)

  • renegat0x03 hours ago
    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

    • oneeyedpigeon30 minutes ago
      Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".
  • qmarchi4 hours ago
    > 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.

  • bronlund4 hours ago
    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.

    • kulahan4 hours ago
      FYI you can just write a quick script to replace that with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID and it works, at least on a desktop firefox browser with an adblocker on it. Weirdly, it seems to explicitly not work in Discord?
      • sheept3 hours ago
        Discord has special handling for certain websites' embeds, including YouTube. Maybe because they already have to pull other video information by ID, they determine whether to use the shorts player based on YouTube's API rather than the URL used.
  • chrismorganan hour ago
    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.)

    • NicuCalcea37 minutes ago
      I think that battle is lost. RSS is already terminology the internet is slowly forgetting, being pedantic and insisting some RSS feeds should actually be called Atom feeds will only accelerate that.
  • kebman23 minutes ago
    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...

  • ajdude5 hours ago
    > 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.

    • dflock2 hours ago
      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...

      ----

      From this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032508

    • unbolted30325 hours ago
      I've had success marking any URL with /shorts/ in it as read. I use FreshRSS and its URL matching is pretty reliable.
    • arjiean hour ago
      I went to see a video I'd uploaded to Youtube a while ago and it's now a short. I have no idea how it became a youtube short. Either I grandpa'd it or they upgrade all vertical form video to shorts.

      https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qc5PKbJ3tq4

      Entirely possible it's the former.

    • sheept3 hours ago
      Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
      • theshrike792 hours ago
        Most channels post just clips of full videos on Shorts, it's not original content.

        I've already seen the full video, I don't want to see clips of it again.

        Also 90% of my RSS reading is done on a desktop/laptop and it feels "wrong" to watch 30 second vertical shorts on a 32" display :D

      • abelitoo3 hours ago
        Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.
  • zImPatrick22 minutes ago
    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...
  • spondyl5 hours ago
    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.

    • chrismorganan hour ago
      My first page load just now responded “Sorry / We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight...” (unknown status code). Second eventually returned 502 Gateway Timeout. Third gave 429 with the message you describe. Fourth eventually gave the actual page.
  • zeta01345 hours ago
    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.
    • eowln2 hours ago
      How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.
  • gsich23 minutes ago
    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.
  • 4 hours ago
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  • QuiDortDine4 hours ago
    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.
  • eunice2 hours ago
    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
  • NordStreamYacht4 hours ago
    This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.
  • verisimi4 hours ago
    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.
  • imagetic5 hours ago
    Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.
  • tosti3 hours ago
    Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.
  • zarmin3 hours ago
    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.
    • zimpenfishan hour ago
      You used to be able to via `https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL` but it appears the last time I successfully did that was March 2025.

      Now I just use the like button which triggers an IFTTT applet to send a webhook to my server which downloads the video. (Sadly IFTTT has no "when you add to a playlist" trigger.)

  • charcircuit3 hours ago
    >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.

    • ballooney3 hours ago
      The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.
  • nicman233 hours ago
    youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol
    • theshrike792 hours ago
      They've always had feeds, they just stopped surfacing them properly around the time they killed Reader.
  • shevy-javaan hour ago
    Google itself is broken. Admittedly though, how many folks use RSS feeds? I never managed to get into it.