6 ms·

Tell HN: YouTube RSS feeds are gone

79 points by dvh 3y ago

The RSS feeds are returning 404, for example https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxahdLz7bap-VDs9h35A and link that used to be on the channel's "Videos" page is gone as well. Is this the end of RSS feeds on youtube?

KomoD 3y ago
I had no clue YouTube had RSS feeds and now I'm too late :/
- crtasm 3y ago
  They're back online - try now!
kt233 3y ago
Also in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175495
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
baal80spam 3y ago
Nnnnnoooooo :(
vdaea 3y ago
I clicked on one of the ones I follow and it showed a 500 error, then after refreshing it showed a 404 error, so hopefully temporary, but this being Google, these feeds were clearly going to disappear one day.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
I'm using newsblur for rss and am still getting youtube RSS feeds.
- corobo 3y ago
  Are they still updating or is newsblur caching the feed at the point before it 404'd?
  - yunruse 3y ago
    Extra anecdata: I've been fetching with Feedly and, having looked into it, it has all my subscriptions right up to a video released just around the same time as this NewPipe issue was raised [0]. I'd wager it's just caching; the YouTube RSS has been down for at least 4 hours (though as another commenter says, Invidious feeds[1] seems to work!) [0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801#issuecomment-1915457626 https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801#issuecom... [1] https://invidious.io https://invidious.io, e.g. https://yewtu.be https://yewtu.be
xnx 3y ago
Interesting. The page source still contains link tags referencing the RSS, so either just broken feeds or in the process of being removed. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxahdLz7bap-VDs9h35A https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxah...">
happytoexplain 3y ago
I've probably watched (actively and passively) on average, hours of YouTube every day for a decade. In all that time, RSS is exclusively how I've consumed those videos, aside from sometimes clicking on videos in the sidebar of the video I arrived at via RSS. If RSS goes away and no 3rd party is able to restore it, I really don't know what I'd do. I can't imagine stopping watching all of the channels I follow, but I also can't imagine using email or app notifications. Those vectors are simply unacceptable for the nature of this particular information stream.
- xz18r 3y ago
  There are multiple ways to solve your case: - set up an account with email notifications and use something like KillTheNewsletter to deliver them via RSS - set up your own alternative YouTube frontend (or register for a public one like kavin.rocks) that supports RSS feeds. Things like Piped or Invidious support it iirc. - get an actual YouTube account and work with subscriptions. You support the channel you like with it and have everything in a handy overview. I am a big time RSS user but never took the time to move it all over there, been using the subscriptions page as my YouTube “homepage” for a decade now and it works for me.
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    - KillTheNewsletter Looks like I'd have to make a YouTube account for every channel to get separate feeds, or else combine every channel into one big feed. - subscriptions Similarly, it looks like this is just one big list of videos from every channel, with only a handful fitting on screen at once, and they don't go away once I've watched/clicked on the video, so there's no concept of read/unread. It also means I would have yet another aggregation webpage I periodically visit, as opposed to having most of my information feed in two places (one tab for email and one tab for RSS). - set up your own alternative This is currently outside my skillset, but it may ultimately be the direction I go in (if the outage isn't just a bug). Thanks for these nouns - I can use them to get started.
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
duckman1 3y ago
The impact of this is not worth considering.
- janice1999 3y ago
  It is for the people using it. Also it's yet another example of the death of open standards and interoperability.
user982 3y ago
YouTube embeds suddenly started crashing one of my browsers with OOM errors today. The timing may be related to broader changes.
jesusofnazarath 3y ago
Thankfully Invidious provides their own RSS feeds
- minus7 3y ago
  Unfortunately that feature of invidious also seems to depend on the upstream RSS URLs and the feeds are just empty at the moment
GrumpySloth 3y ago
I guess I’ll stop watching YouTube. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
msadowski 3y ago
That’s a bummer if true and not a temporary issue. The RSS is my workflow for creating a newsletter and if RSS does not work then I’m way less likely to include any yt content because I simply won’t come across this. It’s not like Google would care about this either.
dddw 3y ago
It wouldn't suprise me that newpipe is partially the target here... https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801 https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801
diimdeep 3y ago
What a Theatre of the absurd. > Hey @TeamYouTube Seems like RSS feeds for YouTube channels are not working currently (returning 404). > without showing any personal info, mind sharing a short vid clip of how you got the error message so we can take a closer look? https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1752050647078244437 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1752050647078244437 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
smileybarry 3y ago
Both the OP's URL and the one linked by @xnx work for me, could it have been temporary? Or maybe a caching issue? (And my region's YouTube CDN servers aren't affected?) Could be Google are actually removing this but A/B testing it first?
- notanavacado 3y ago
  I believe it just started working again. It was not working for me until a few minutes ago.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  Confirmed working for me again, too. My feed reader is updating again. I think I'm still going to look at building a yt-dlp/JSON to RSS alternative, though. I don't trust that this isn't foreshadowing and not a bug.
- user982 3y ago
  RSS feeds are resolving for me again, and the embedded YouTube crash I mentioned in this thread seems to have simultaneously stopped. Hopefully whatever this was has been reverted.
- yunruse 3y ago
  Can confirm, feeds are back up. For posterity, if it ever breaks I made a rough proxy script: https://gist.github.com/yunruse/93dd40719568dccccebcca26d9ed1ccb https://gist.github.com/yunruse/93dd40719568dccccebcca26d9ed...
- voussoir 3y ago
  I use Youtube's RSS feeds in one of my programs and this happens once every couple of months. They'll 404 or 503 for half a day and then come back. Not looking forward to the day they don't come back, of course!
ecef9-8c0f-4374 3y ago
I hope this is a bug and gets fixed. The site never worked for me. "Watch later" a list of dead videos of which I can't even find out the names. Since I found the feeds I use only RSS with Feedbro. Well.. I will properly save a lot of time not watching youtube anymore.
freediver 3y ago
Noticed this yesterday too. Perhaps a mistake?
jamescridland 3y ago
That RSS feed is working just fine for me... ?
1jreuben1 3y ago
feedly has an RSS feed builder - works for Medium, Youtube https://feedly.com/new-features/posts/easily-follow-websites-that-don-t-have-rss-feeds https://feedly.com/new-features/posts/easily-follow-websites...

79 points by dvh 3y ago

KomoD 3y ago

I had no clue YouTube had RSS feeds and now I'm too late :/

crtasm 3y ago
They're back online - try now!

kt233 3y ago

Also in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175495

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

baal80spam 3y ago

Nnnnnoooooo :(

vdaea 3y ago

I clicked on one of the ones I follow and it showed a 500 error, then after refreshing it showed a 404 error, so hopefully temporary, but this being Google, these feeds were clearly going to disappear one day.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

I'm using newsblur for rss and am still getting youtube RSS feeds.

corobo 3y ago
Are they still updating or is newsblur caching the feed at the point before it 404'd?
- yunruse 3y ago
  Extra anecdata: I've been fetching with Feedly and, having looked into it, it has all my subscriptions right up to a video released just around the same time as this NewPipe issue was raised [0]. I'd wager it's just caching; the YouTube RSS has been down for at least 4 hours (though as another commenter says, Invidious feeds[1] seems to work!) [0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801#issuecomment-1915457626 https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801#issuecom... [1] https://invidious.io https://invidious.io, e.g. https://yewtu.be https://yewtu.be

xnx 3y ago

Interesting. The page source still contains link tags referencing the RSS, so either just broken feeds or in the process of being removed. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxahdLz7bap-VDs9h35A https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxah...">

happytoexplain 3y ago

I've probably watched (actively and passively) on average, hours of YouTube every day for a decade. In all that time, RSS is exclusively how I've consumed those videos, aside from sometimes clicking on videos in the sidebar of the video I arrived at via RSS. If RSS goes away and no 3rd party is able to restore it, I really don't know what I'd do. I can't imagine stopping watching all of the channels I follow, but I also can't imagine using email or app notifications. Those vectors are simply unacceptable for the nature of this particular information stream.

xz18r 3y ago
There are multiple ways to solve your case: - set up an account with email notifications and use something like KillTheNewsletter to deliver them via RSS - set up your own alternative YouTube frontend (or register for a public one like kavin.rocks) that supports RSS feeds. Things like Piped or Invidious support it iirc. - get an actual YouTube account and work with subscriptions. You support the channel you like with it and have everything in a handy overview. I am a big time RSS user but never took the time to move it all over there, been using the subscriptions page as my YouTube “homepage” for a decade now and it works for me.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  - KillTheNewsletter Looks like I'd have to make a YouTube account for every channel to get separate feeds, or else combine every channel into one big feed. - subscriptions Similarly, it looks like this is just one big list of videos from every channel, with only a handful fitting on screen at once, and they don't go away once I've watched/clicked on the video, so there's no concept of read/unread. It also means I would have yet another aggregation webpage I periodically visit, as opposed to having most of my information feed in two places (one tab for email and one tab for RSS). - set up your own alternative This is currently outside my skillset, but it may ultimately be the direction I go in (if the outage isn't just a bug). Thanks for these nouns - I can use them to get started.
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago

duckman1 3y ago

The impact of this is not worth considering.

janice1999 3y ago
It is for the people using it. Also it's yet another example of the death of open standards and interoperability.

user982 3y ago

YouTube embeds suddenly started crashing one of my browsers with OOM errors today. The timing may be related to broader changes.

jesusofnazarath 3y ago

Thankfully Invidious provides their own RSS feeds

minus7 3y ago
Unfortunately that feature of invidious also seems to depend on the upstream RSS URLs and the feeds are just empty at the moment

GrumpySloth 3y ago

I guess I’ll stop watching YouTube. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

msadowski 3y ago

That’s a bummer if true and not a temporary issue. The RSS is my workflow for creating a newsletter and if RSS does not work then I’m way less likely to include any yt content because I simply won’t come across this. It’s not like Google would care about this either.

dddw 3y ago

It wouldn't suprise me that newpipe is partially the target here... https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801 https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10801

diimdeep 3y ago

What a Theatre of the absurd. > Hey @TeamYouTube Seems like RSS feeds for YouTube channels are not working currently (returning 404). > without showing any personal info, mind sharing a short vid clip of how you got the error message so we can take a closer look? https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1752050647078244437 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1752050647078244437 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

smileybarry 3y ago

Both the OP's URL and the one linked by @xnx work for me, could it have been temporary? Or maybe a caching issue? (And my region's YouTube CDN servers aren't affected?) Could be Google are actually removing this but A/B testing it first?

notanavacado 3y ago
I believe it just started working again. It was not working for me until a few minutes ago.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
Confirmed working for me again, too. My feed reader is updating again. I think I'm still going to look at building a yt-dlp/JSON to RSS alternative, though. I don't trust that this isn't foreshadowing and not a bug.
user982 3y ago
RSS feeds are resolving for me again, and the embedded YouTube crash I mentioned in this thread seems to have simultaneously stopped. Hopefully whatever this was has been reverted.
yunruse 3y ago
Can confirm, feeds are back up. For posterity, if it ever breaks I made a rough proxy script: https://gist.github.com/yunruse/93dd40719568dccccebcca26d9ed1ccb https://gist.github.com/yunruse/93dd40719568dccccebcca26d9ed...
voussoir 3y ago
I use Youtube's RSS feeds in one of my programs and this happens once every couple of months. They'll 404 or 503 for half a day and then come back. Not looking forward to the day they don't come back, of course!

ecef9-8c0f-4374 3y ago

I hope this is a bug and gets fixed. The site never worked for me. "Watch later" a list of dead videos of which I can't even find out the names. Since I found the feeds I use only RSS with Feedbro. Well.. I will properly save a lot of time not watching youtube anymore.

freediver 3y ago

Noticed this yesterday too. Perhaps a mistake?

jamescridland 3y ago

That RSS feed is working just fine for me... ?

1jreuben1 3y ago

feedly has an RSS feed builder - works for Medium, Youtube https://feedly.com/new-features/posts/easily-follow-websites-that-don-t-have-rss-feeds https://feedly.com/new-features/posts/easily-follow-websites...