YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken | Hacker News Reader

YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

openrss.org

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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.

Then again, supported APIs from Google have exactly the same guarantees.

Fair point. TBH from Google I might trust a now-unofficial (or always-was-unofficial) API kept alive by some big legacy contract a little more than an actively published & encouraged one, unless the latter is also similarly protected!

I actually do this whenever I add a youtube channel, but some shorts still sneak through. Just as a warning to whoever tries it themselves.

(a little bit of self-promo but) If anyone is looking for an RSS reader that splits out shorts from videos automatically, I made my open source reader Serial in part for exactly this

https://serial.tube/

Any idea if there's a way to get the Shorts-only feed?

Looks like UUSH may be what you're looking for, according to: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19795987/youtube-channel...

I have not verified this.

Thank you!

Please don't remind Google that they still have RSS feeds, they'll just kill them entirely.

Got to feed the Google graveyard somehow

They could also make money from them using micropayments. Free if there's a delay. Then split proceeds with creators.

Would that money be even remotely comparable to the engineering time spent on this, especially compared to the money they're making on ads?

Point taken, but - I think it's a good way to start a micropayment culture. It's like putting numbers up on houses - they're just cheap digits but all of a sudden people can receive mail. Actually, YT micropayments would be like having a PO box.

"money making ads" I'm surprised they haven't made their own coin to go with that. Perhaps a new coin should be part of that micropayment culture. Look what happened with Binance coin because so many people were using the site already and they could roll one out.

In reality, they could have made so much money from Gmail account recovery too. All of Google's shelved projects - maybe all they need is an efficient micropayment system to slap on whatever they put out - Google Reader included.

Can we not do things for fun anymore?

Only for a while, then we want tips when the fun wears off. Imagine Google Reader was still going because the maintainers got the most micropayment tips, and thus the best raises/promotions, while also having the most fun at work. What do you think?

Google Reader was shut for the same reason many things was shut by Google. However, once a piece of software works and is fully featured which Reader was, you don't need endless updates, just security and to work with the latest version of an OS which isn't a significant time lose.

Raises and promotions should never be correlated to busiest staff member.

> 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)

> 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 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)

Probably CGNAT, "Carrier-Grade NAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

Huge, huge numbers of machines behind a single external IP mean that your internet access carries all their reputation by proxy. Since switching off Comcast to a smaller fiber company that uses CGNAT I've seen somewhat more Cloudflare challenges.

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.

Same here but I'm using a ssh based proxy to avoid having my local ISP data mine my web traffic. Definitely not going to turn it off either to read a blog.

I really wish admins banned based on actual behavior instead of IP address != residential/mobile.

Open RSS, your caching is broken?

  GET /blog/youtube-your-feeds-are-broken HTTP/1.1
  Host: openrss.org

  HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
  Cache-Control: public,max-age=1200
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Date: Wed, 06 May 2026 18:06:13 GMT
  Retry-After: 1162
  Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)

  [empty page]

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...

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.

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

I thought they already did a decade ago.

For real. There has to be an RSS fan high up in the company, because RSS allows users to bypass the very thing YT are pushing so hard for i.e. recommendations and shorts.

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

Twitter had RSS feeds many moons ago:

* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...

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

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

tried to use it but gave up after the 3rd popup modal

just let me use the thing

Interesting idea. How do you get those twitter feeds if I may ask? Are you using nitter?

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".

no, the paragraph argues that something needs to be glued together, which is not true, so it is not entirely about 'visibility'.

It used to be visible in the URL bar until browsers killed that feature.

Agreed! For Firefox, those features can be put back there with 'Awesome RSS' and 'RSSPreview':

https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss

https://github.com/aureliendavid/rsspreview

> 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.

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

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

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

For myself, I've curated my recommendation algorithm down to the point that I don't mind the shorts I get recommended, they're generally from content creators I like anyhow, or content creators that use shorts as their primary medium in ways I'm generally OK with, but the UI is trash. For some reason, I can cast normal videos to my Roku, but if I try to cast a short, it cancels casting, quite explicitly with a popup saying "hey this is going to cancel casting, are you sure?". But the Roku YouTube app is perfectly capable of navigating to a short in the UI and playing it.

And no matter how much I curate the algorithm, the thing that it wants to play next in the Shorts UI is effectively random to me. Not once have I ever seen one that is even a decent recommendation. Maybe I'm hitting some weird edge case because I'm having the opposite problem some people report; Shorts aren't horrifically addictive and I can't stop scrolling, I can't start. The recommendations in my feed are OK but the "next short" is uniformly terrible for me.

That's why I try to prune them down a bit.

I keep up the fight because as a recent article noticed, YouTube is still a unique video service with an astonishing amount of high-quality content from small creators, fascinating math videos, how-to videos, etc. I'm more-or-less winning the fight with the algorithm at the moment and it still often turns up interesting things. But it is a constant fight to keep it from becoming a lowest-common-denominator feed. Goodness help you if someone links you a YouTube video of a cat being stupid or anything political, get that watch out of your History before you forget.

As someone who's been working on an RSS reader for primarily YouTube content (https://serial.tube), it's 99% content quality and content duplication. I did hear of one specific person who does actually watch them, but that was specifically for artists who only post their progress updates over shorts.

The solution I came up with was being able to sort/filter on all content/just videos/just shorts on a per view (folder) basis, so you can opt into them but they are omitted by default. Curious what other people's approaches are

Why not both?

I try to stay far away from shorts in general- YouTube plays them at maximum volume on my desktop and they suck attention , I feel like they're actively harmful.

Though for content that i follow, Almost every one of these shorts end up just being a snippet of a video they already posted, usually being used as a glorified ad for that existing video. It's just a waste of time.

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'll give this a try!

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”?

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.

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.

These feeds have been going down every day around the same time for a few hours for at least the past several months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1r61jpo/all_youtub...

OpenRSS, your website is broken. I get:

> Too many requests are being made from this network, which brings down the performance of feeds for other users. Please try back later.

With regards to the topic, I've noticed this when using FreeTube during certain periods of the day.

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.

As someone who's been working on an RSS reader primarily for YouTube off and on for the last year or two (https://serial.tube), the feed vanishing has been the bane of my existence – so many moments of wondering "oh god what did I break now" only to realize it's YouTube yet again

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?

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.

How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.

I got lucky: the only creator doing that used a consistent name for the video, so I could pattern match on that. I haven't found anything that would work universally.

For the home page, I would recommend the "UnTrap for Youtube" browser extension.

All this time newpipe was telling me that channels had disappeared from my subscriptions. Now your telling me they haven't but YouTube is just broken!

Newpipe asks you if you want to delete the sub. I've lost Lots of subscriptions this way. Damn!

I'm actually quite baffled they even still have RSS. I use it, but I expect it to quietly die at some point.

I wonder if they keep it around because, without it, someone would be make and even less efficient means of getting at the information. What I'd really prefer is an email when a followed channel post a full video (Shorts can go to hell). And that email should forever and always be only that, never for anything else. Wouldn't even mind if it was just a "Premium" feature.

> In case you haven't caught on yet, some of us will just never be interested in being manipulated by those brain-rotting, never-ending homepage feeds you love shoving in our faces the moment we log in.

Quite. I always feel if platforms were used based on merit, if monopolies didn't exist (and Google does prop Youtube up with its own funds) then companies would HAVE to listen to people. Degrees of incompetence would be punished by firing. But we don't live in that world

This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.

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!

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!

How about YouTube RSS feed, where description contains summary from video in text format? Imagine how much time could be saved because TL;DW. Of course, Google would never do such a thing.

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.

Atom fanatics are the vegans of feed enjoyers. For most people RSS refers to both the concept the and particular encoding used and does not imply that both are referenced.

Btw, XHTML also lost to HTML for the same reason - what matters is that stuff works, not that pedants are happy.

Thank you for the interjection.

>The feeds we can subscribe to in our own feed reader to follow our favorite creators without having to be on your platform at all?

And why would YouTube go out of their way to allow you to do that?

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.

Neither miniFlux nor NewsBlur have any issues discovering YouTube feeds based on the channel URL, with multiple feed formats provided (RSS, Atom, JSON, etc).

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

I didn’t know they had feeds?

I only recently found out GitHub releases have rss feeds! Great way to stay up to date on projects like raylib.

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.

OMG, shorts are broken - 1x speed feels like .25x speed. FIX that sheot, let me set default 2x on everything

Their mobile app is broken too, all the thumbnails are super zoomed in so you can't read any text on them anymore.

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.

Open RSS, your website is slow

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

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?

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.

Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.

Didn't ruin Alphabet though.

> 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.

I agree, it's a nonsensical complaint. It's a feed of the channels videos and some of those videos are short. If you don't like their content, why are you subscribed?

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.)

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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