YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

(openrss.org)

66 points | by veeti 5 hours ago

17 comments

  • dawidpotocki 1 hour 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...

  • renegat0x0 44 minutes 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

  • bronlund 1 hour 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.

    • kulahan 1 hour 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?
      • sheept 1 hour 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.
  • qmarchi 2 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.

  • krembo 27 minutes 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
  • ajdude 2 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.

    • unbolted3032 2 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.
    • sheept 1 hour ago
      Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
      • abelitoo 48 minutes ago
        Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.
  • spondyl 2 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.

  • zeta0134 2 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.
    • eowln 15 minutes ago
      How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.
  • NordStreamYacht 2 hours ago
    This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.
  • QuiDortDine 2 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.
  • tosti 1 hour ago
    Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.
  • verisimi 1 hour 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.
  • imagetic 2 hours ago
    Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.
  • zarmin 29 minutes 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.
  • nicman23 1 hour ago
    youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol
  • charcircuit 1 hour 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.

    • ballooney 17 minutes ago
      The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.