> I wonder how they use these feeds if that's only internal.
Perhaps they don't, it could be that the interface was written to a more flexible spec to allow for ongoing changes, and close to release they decided which features would be officially supported. In that case the method being used here is either deliberately kept around for potential future use, or is a bit of their tech debt.
It may also be something that is internally supported still because it is used in legacy apps that are still out there (some smart TVs have ancient apps and no upgrade path) but they don't want it used by new code as it will eventuality be removed.
In any of those cases, there is no guarantee it'll still be there tomorrow.
> When visiting a YouTube channel, there's no link to follow it in a feed reader, no "add feed" button, nothing.
Youtube does actually provide a <link> to these feeds, but _only_ if you press refresh in your browser after navigating to a channel's videos page. Their single-page-app breaks feeds and hitting refresh works around this by loading the correct page from scratch.
(To address the second point in this text: yes having an actual visible feed link or icon on the page itself should also be normalised)
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
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...
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
> 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.
I get that sort of stuff quite a lot - its because my workplace uses a proxy to connect to the intranet, and traffic routed by that proxy is often blocked (zscaler)
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?
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.
At a company I was working for, we need to offer live stream detection to push notifications and keep a banner in app. One of the methods to detect was through the RSS channel feed, but it wasn't reliable, because some channels are listing their entries and others are not!
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.
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.:
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.
They have been “upgrading” old videos to shorts for more than a year. As far as I know it once started with videos with a runtime of at most 30 seconds.
At some point that was increased to 3 minutes.
I think they do this to square and portrait videos, maybe the check is as simple as “height >= width and duration <= 3 minutes”?
Neither miniFlux nor NewsBlur have any issues discovering YouTube feeds based on the channel URL, with multiple feed formats provided (RSS, Atom, JSON, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I think their site got hugged to death. It worked for me at first but not anymore. Now I get:
> Too many requests are being made, which brings down the performance of feeds for other users. Please wait a while before requesting more feed content or log in for full access
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.
As a YouTube app user, these complaints are also part of the core app experience. Notifications often never land, especially if you're _trying to_ follow someone's live streams. Even if you're a mod... (Sometimes appearing hours after the live or even the next day or never.)
It'll even randomly drop subscriptions. Forcing the user to resubscribe.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
I have a MiniFlux instance running on my Raspberry Pi, pulling from my 367 subscribed channels. It beats having to go through the "Subscripitons" page every day on the horrible YouTube UI, instead I can just go through the list in the feed, mark the uninteresting ones as read, keep the good videos in the feed and whenever I have time I can pick from those to watch.
I also have some feeds tagged as "music", for which I have a cronjob that calls yt-dlp to download the songs/mixes, nicely stashing the M4A files on a NAS, so I can keep up with new music, going through new releases at my own pace, keeping the good ones, deleting the shit ones.
If you ever had favorited songs deleted from YouTube, you will understand why this all makes sense.
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.)
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.
They’re feeds. That’s an adequate term and the best one to use. Adding RSS may gain familiarity, but it also loses accuracy. There was no good reason to alter the title.
If I saw a headline saying "YouTube, your feeds are broken", I would think the post is about YouTube's algorithmic feeds. Search for "youtube feed", and you'll see that all the results are about that.
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...
Thanks, I guess I can get rid of my cron task that marks shorts as read in Nextcloud News. How did you find out?
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...
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.
> I wonder how they use these feeds if that's only internal.
Perhaps they don't, it could be that the interface was written to a more flexible spec to allow for ongoing changes, and close to release they decided which features would be officially supported. In that case the method being used here is either deliberately kept around for potential future use, or is a bit of their tech debt.
It may also be something that is internally supported still because it is used in legacy apps that are still out there (some smart TVs have ancient apps and no upgrade path) but they don't want it used by new code as it will eventuality be removed.
In any of those cases, there is no guarantee it'll still be there tomorrow.
> When visiting a YouTube channel, there's no link to follow it in a feed reader, no "add feed" button, nothing.
Youtube does actually provide a <link> to these feeds, but _only_ if you press refresh in your browser after navigating to a channel's videos page. Their single-page-app breaks feeds and hitting refresh works around this by loading the correct page from scratch.
(To address the second point in this text: yes having an actual visible feed link or icon on the page itself should also be normalised)
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
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...
tried to use it but gave up after the 3rd popup modal
just let me use the thing
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
looks nice, but i am using firefox and website is broken, lost of text overlap. horizontal scroll not working etc
> 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.
I get that sort of stuff quite a lot - its because my workplace uses a proxy to connect to the intranet, and traffic routed by that proxy is often blocked (zscaler)
I got that at first but it worked after a refresh. So it doesn't look like an actual ban.
I use a medium sized Australian ISP and got the same, maybe they just have whole regions blocked...?
I'm also blocked, but I'm in the UK use a fairly niche and small ISP (uno.uk)
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.
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?
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.
When I go to the website it says: "Open RSS Sorry
We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight..."
Works for me 6 minutes later. But that must have made you giggle a little!
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
Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".
At a company I was working for, we need to offer live stream detection to push notifications and keep a banner in app. One of the methods to detect was through the RSS channel feed, but it wasn't reliable, because some channels are listing their entries and others are not!
Hush, don't remind them that they have RSS feeds, or they might remove them altogether.
I thought they already did a decade 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.
I've had success marking any URL with /shorts/ in it as read. I use FreshRSS and its URL matching is pretty reliable.
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
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.
They have been “upgrading” old videos to shorts for more than a year. As far as I know it once started with videos with a runtime of at most 30 seconds. At some point that was increased to 3 minutes. I think they do this to square and portrait videos, maybe the check is as simple as “height >= width and duration <= 3 minutes”?
Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
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
Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.
Neither miniFlux nor NewsBlur have any issues discovering YouTube feeds based on the channel URL, with multiple feed formats provided (RSS, Atom, JSON, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the home page, I would recommend the "UnTrap for Youtube" browser extension.
How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.
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.
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...
Why would anyone use RSS for their notes?
Open RSS, your website is slow
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...
I think their site got hugged to death. It worked for me at first but not anymore. Now I get:
> Too many requests are being made, which brings down the performance of feeds for other users. Please wait a while before requesting more feed content or log in for full access
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.
As a YouTube app user, these complaints are also part of the core app experience. Notifications often never land, especially if you're _trying to_ follow someone's live streams. Even if you're a mod... (Sometimes appearing hours after the live or even the next day or never.)
It'll even randomly drop subscriptions. Forcing the user to resubscribe.
Thanks vibe coding?
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.
This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.
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
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.
> 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.
Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.
Didn't ruin Alphabet though.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.
You can say the engagement is through the roof about any activity that is popular.
youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol
They've always had feeds, they just stopped surfacing them properly around the time they killed Reader.
Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.
Google itself is broken. Admittedly though, how many folks use RSS feeds? I never managed to get into it.
I have a MiniFlux instance running on my Raspberry Pi, pulling from my 367 subscribed channels. It beats having to go through the "Subscripitons" page every day on the horrible YouTube UI, instead I can just go through the list in the feed, mark the uninteresting ones as read, keep the good videos in the feed and whenever I have time I can pick from those to watch.
I also have some feeds tagged as "music", for which I have a cronjob that calls yt-dlp to download the songs/mixes, nicely stashing the M4A files on a NAS, so I can keep up with new music, going through new releases at my own pace, keeping the good ones, deleting the shit ones.
If you ever had favorited songs deleted from YouTube, you will understand why this all makes sense.
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.)
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.
They’re feeds. That’s an adequate term and the best one to use. Adding RSS may gain familiarity, but it also loses accuracy. There was no good reason to alter the title.
If I saw a headline saying "YouTube, your feeds are broken", I would think the post is about YouTube's algorithmic feeds. Search for "youtube feed", and you'll see that all the results are about that.