YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

Posted by veeti 9 hours ago

YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken(openrss.org)

138 points | 56 comments

dawidpotocki 5 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...

jraph 3 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?

dawidpotocki 3 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...

jraph 2 hours 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.

krembo 4 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

Esn024 2 hours 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)

EDIT 2: also, is there an option for a more compact view of a feed, with just the titles and no images? Also, is there a way to filter a feed (or a whole bunch of feeds) by date range? Otherwise, I can see it becoming pretty hard to find something older, eventually, having to click "load more" over and over again...

flaviolivolsi 1 hour ago|||

Looks nice, maybe it lacks some categories. For example I was looking for cycling (both as sport and outdoor activity), bikepacking and chess but there doesn't seem to be anything related

scbzzzzz 31 minutes ago||

looks nice, but i am using firefox and website is broken, lost of text overlap. horizontal scroll not working etc

qmarchi 5 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.

notsylver 24 minutes ago|

I use a medium sized Australian ISP and got the same, maybe they just have whole regions blocked...?

akpa1 26 minutes ago||

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.

renegat0x0 4 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

oneeyedpigeon 2 hours ago|

Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".

bronlund 5 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.

kulahan 5 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?

sheept 5 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.

rsanek 13 minutes ago||

Open RSS, your website is slow

ajdude 6 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 6 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.

dflock 3 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

arjie 2 hours 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.

sheept 4 hours ago||

Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?

theshrike79 3 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

abelitoo 4 hours ago|||

Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.

rambambram 1 hour 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.

TonyTrapp 51 minutes ago|

Hush, don't remind them that they have RSS feeds, or they might remove them altogether.

Pay08 44 minutes ago|

I thought they already did a decade ago.

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