8 ms·

YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

340 points by veeti 5mo ago

spondyl 5mo 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.
- chrismorgan 5mo ago
  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.
zeta0134 5mo 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 5mo ago
  How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.
  - zeta0134 5mo ago
    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.
- kakwa_ 5mo ago
  For the home page, I would recommend the "UnTrap for Youtube" browser extension.
ajdude 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
  - abelitoo 5mo ago
    Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.
  - theshrike79 5mo 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
  - jerf 5mo ago
    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.
imagetic 5mo ago
Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.
- hirako2000 5mo ago
  Didn't ruin Alphabet though.
NordStreamYacht 5mo ago
This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.
QuiDortDine 5mo 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.
qmarchi 5mo 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 5mo ago
  I use a medium sized Australian ISP and got the same, maybe they just have whole regions blocked...?
  - jamiecurle 5mo ago
    I'm also blocked, but I'm in the UK use a fairly niche and small ISP (uno.uk)
  - jerf 5mo ago
    Probably CGNAT, "Carrier-Grade NAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- RugnirViking 5mo ago
  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)
- tuoret 5mo ago
  I got that at first but it worked after a refresh. So it doesn't look like an actual ban.
- alyandon 5mo ago
  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.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
bronlund 5mo ago
I use a script to read the feed which then checks every video against https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID. If it loads (200), it's a Short. Stupid, but it works.
- kulahan 5mo ago
  FYI you can just write a quick script to replace that with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID 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 5mo 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.
verisimi 5mo 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.
dawidpotocki 5mo 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=UCxSGC9BtJN2jgcz7ynXWdOw 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=UULFxSGC9BtJN2jgcz7ynXWdOw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFxSG...
- jraph 5mo 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 5mo 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-youtube-shorts-from-youtube-api-data-v3/76602819#76602819 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
    - jraph 5mo 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.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - dspillett 5mo ago
        > 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.
nicman23 5mo ago
youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol
- theshrike79 5mo ago
  They've always had feeds, they just stopped surfacing them properly around the time they killed Reader.
charcircuit 5mo 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 5mo ago
  The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.
  - charcircuit 5mo ago
    You can say the engagement is through the roof about any activity that is popular.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
tosti 5mo ago
Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.
renegat0x0 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".
  - renegat0x0 5mo ago
    no, the paragraph argues that something needs to be glued together, which is not true, so it is not entirely about 'visibility'.
  - account42 5mo ago
    It used to be visible in the URL bar until browsers killed that feature.
    - Baljhin 5mo ago
      Agreed! For Firefox, those features can be put back there with 'Awesome RSS' and 'RSSPreview': https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss https://github.com/aureliendavid/rsspreview https://github.com/aureliendavid/rsspreview
zarmin 5mo 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.
- zimpenfish 5mo ago
  You used to be able to via `https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL 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.)
krembo 5mo 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 https://aggly.com
- Esn024 5mo 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 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 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  looks nice, but i am using firefox and website is broken, lost of text overlap. horizontal scroll not working etc
- fusslo 5mo ago
  tried to use it but gave up after the 3rd popup modal just let me use the thing
eunice 5mo ago
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
shevy-java 5mo ago
Google itself is broken. Admittedly though, how many folks use RSS feeds? I never managed to get into it.
- black-adder 5mo ago
  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.
chrismorgan 5mo ago
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.)
- NicuCalcea 5mo ago
  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.
  - chrismorgan 5mo ago
    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.
    - NicuCalcea 5mo ago
      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.
- account42 5mo ago
  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.
- 5mo ago
gsich 5mo ago
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.
kebman 5mo ago
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...
- PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
  Why would anyone use RSS for their notes?
zImPatrick 5mo ago
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.org/blog/youtube-your-feeds-are-broken https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...
- i_think_so 5mo ago
  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
rambambram 5mo 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.
Dylan16807 5mo ago
> 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.
- praisewhitey 5mo ago
  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?
TonyTrapp 5mo ago
Hush, don't remind them that they have RSS feeds, or they might remove them altogether.
- Pay08 5mo ago
  I thought they already did a decade ago.
- protoster 5mo 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.
- throw0101c 5mo ago
  > 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.html https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
antisol 5mo ago
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.
akpa1 5mo 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.
rsanek 5mo ago
Open RSS, your website is slow
zelphirkalt 5mo ago
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.
firebot 5mo ago
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?
stasomatic 5mo ago
Neither miniFlux nor NewsBlur have any issues discovering YouTube feeds based on the channel URL, with multiple feed formats provided (RSS, Atom, JSON, etc).
brunoarueira 5mo ago
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!
SpyCoder77 5mo ago
When I go to the website it says: "Open RSS Sorry We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight..."
- PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
  Works for me 6 minutes later. But that must have made you giggle a little!
hales 5mo ago
> 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)
pipeline_peak 5mo ago
>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?
account42 5mo ago
Please don't remind Google that they still have RSS feeds, they'll just kill them entirely.
- xyst 5mo ago
  Got to feed the Google graveyard somehow
- adrianwaj 5mo ago
  They could also make money from them using micropayments. Free if there's a delay. Then split proceeds with creators.
  - pavel_lishin 5mo ago
    Would that money be even remotely comparable to the engineering time spent on this, especially compared to the money they're making on ads?
    - adrianwaj 5mo ago
      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.
  - ktallett 5mo ago
    Can we not do things for fun anymore?
    - adrianwaj 5mo ago
kgwxd 5mo ago
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.
alex1138 5mo ago
> 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
nubinetwork 5mo ago
Their mobile app is broken too, all the thumbnails are super zoomed in so you can't read any text on them anymore.
botanical 5mo ago
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.
billdybas 5mo ago
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_youtube_channel_rss_feeds_are_down_return_404/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1r61jpo/all_youtub...
butz 5mo ago
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.
BagelsOverBread 5mo ago
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 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
singpolyma3 5mo ago
[dead]
pierroons 5mo ago
[flagged]
mathnode 5mo ago
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.
aendruk 5mo ago
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.org/blog/youtube-your-feeds-are-broken https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...
martymarkenson 5mo ago
[dead]
tim-projects 5mo ago
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!
sevennull 5mo ago
OMG, shorts are broken - 1x speed feels like .25x speed. FIX that sheot, let me set default 2x on everything

340 points by veeti 5mo 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.

chrismorgan 5mo ago
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.

zeta0134 5mo 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 5mo ago
How do you filter out live streams? They look exactly the same to me in the rss feed.
- zeta0134 5mo ago
  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.
kakwa_ 5mo ago
For the home page, I would recommend the "UnTrap for Youtube" browser extension.

ajdude 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
- abelitoo 5mo ago
  Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.
- theshrike79 5mo 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
- jerf 5mo ago
  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.

imagetic 5mo ago

Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.

hirako2000 5mo ago
Didn't ruin Alphabet though.

NordStreamYacht 5mo ago

This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.

QuiDortDine 5mo 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.

qmarchi 5mo 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 5mo ago
I use a medium sized Australian ISP and got the same, maybe they just have whole regions blocked...?
- jamiecurle 5mo ago
  I'm also blocked, but I'm in the UK use a fairly niche and small ISP (uno.uk)
- jerf 5mo ago
  Probably CGNAT, "Carrier-Grade NAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
RugnirViking 5mo ago
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)
tuoret 5mo ago
I got that at first but it worked after a refresh. So it doesn't look like an actual ban.
alyandon 5mo ago
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.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

bronlund 5mo ago

I use a script to read the feed which then checks every video against https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID. If it loads (200), it's a Short. Stupid, but it works.

kulahan 5mo ago
FYI you can just write a quick script to replace that with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID 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 5mo 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.

verisimi 5mo 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.

dawidpotocki 5mo 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=UCxSGC9BtJN2jgcz7ynXWdOw 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=UULFxSGC9BtJN2jgcz7ynXWdOw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFxSG...

jraph 5mo 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 5mo 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-youtube-shorts-from-youtube-api-data-v3/76602819#76602819 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
  - jraph 5mo 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.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dspillett 5mo ago
      > 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.

nicman23 5mo ago

youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol

theshrike79 5mo ago
They've always had feeds, they just stopped surfacing them properly around the time they killed Reader.

charcircuit 5mo 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 5mo ago
The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.
- charcircuit 5mo ago
  You can say the engagement is through the roof about any activity that is popular.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

tosti 5mo ago

Article reads just like AI slop. The point is probably valid but the writing style gets annoying.

renegat0x0 5mo 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 5mo ago
Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".
- renegat0x0 5mo ago
  no, the paragraph argues that something needs to be glued together, which is not true, so it is not entirely about 'visibility'.
- account42 5mo ago
  It used to be visible in the URL bar until browsers killed that feature.
  - Baljhin 5mo ago
    Agreed! For Firefox, those features can be put back there with 'Awesome RSS' and 'RSSPreview': https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss https://github.com/aureliendavid/rsspreview https://github.com/aureliendavid/rsspreview

zarmin 5mo 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.

zimpenfish 5mo ago
You used to be able to via `https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL 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.)

krembo 5mo 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 https://aggly.com

Esn024 5mo 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 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 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
looks nice, but i am using firefox and website is broken, lost of text overlap. horizontal scroll not working etc
fusslo 5mo ago
tried to use it but gave up after the 3rd popup modal just let me use the thing

eunice 5mo ago

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

shevy-java 5mo ago

Google itself is broken. Admittedly though, how many folks use RSS feeds? I never managed to get into it.

black-adder 5mo ago
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.

chrismorgan 5mo ago

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.)

NicuCalcea 5mo ago
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.
- chrismorgan 5mo ago
  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.
  - NicuCalcea 5mo ago
    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.
account42 5mo ago
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.
5mo ago

gsich 5mo ago

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.

kebman 5mo ago

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...

PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
Why would anyone use RSS for their notes?

zImPatrick 5mo ago

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.org/blog/youtube-your-feeds-are-broken https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...

i_think_so 5mo ago
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

rambambram 5mo 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.

Dylan16807 5mo ago

> 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.

praisewhitey 5mo ago
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?

TonyTrapp 5mo ago

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

Pay08 5mo ago
I thought they already did a decade ago.
protoster 5mo 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.
throw0101c 5mo ago
> 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.html https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...

antisol 5mo ago

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.

akpa1 5mo 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.

rsanek 5mo ago

Open RSS, your website is slow

zelphirkalt 5mo ago

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.

firebot 5mo ago

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?

stasomatic 5mo ago

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

brunoarueira 5mo ago

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!

SpyCoder77 5mo ago

When I go to the website it says: "Open RSS Sorry We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight..."

PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
Works for me 6 minutes later. But that must have made you giggle a little!

hales 5mo ago

> 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)

pipeline_peak 5mo ago

>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?

account42 5mo ago

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

xyst 5mo ago
Got to feed the Google graveyard somehow
adrianwaj 5mo ago
They could also make money from them using micropayments. Free if there's a delay. Then split proceeds with creators.
- pavel_lishin 5mo ago
  Would that money be even remotely comparable to the engineering time spent on this, especially compared to the money they're making on ads?
  - adrianwaj 5mo ago
    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.
- ktallett 5mo ago
  Can we not do things for fun anymore?
  - adrianwaj 5mo ago

kgwxd 5mo ago

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.

alex1138 5mo ago

> 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

nubinetwork 5mo ago

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

botanical 5mo ago

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.

billdybas 5mo ago

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_youtube_channel_rss_feeds_are_down_return_404/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1r61jpo/all_youtub...

butz 5mo ago

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.

BagelsOverBread 5mo ago

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 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

singpolyma3 5mo ago

[dead]

pierroons 5mo ago

[flagged]

mathnode 5mo ago

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.

aendruk 5mo ago

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.org/blog/youtube-your-feeds-are-broken https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...

martymarkenson 5mo ago

[dead]

tim-projects 5mo ago

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!

sevennull 5mo ago

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