YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken(openrss.org) |
YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken(openrss.org) |
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.
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.)
Btw, XHTML also lost to HTML for the same reason - what matters is that stuff works, not that pedants are happy.
And why would YouTube go out of their way to allow you to do that?
> 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 only recently found out GitHub releases have rss feeds! Great way to stay up to date on projects like raylib.
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...
> 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.
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.)
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.
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...
You can find a bit more information here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
I have not verified this.
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)
Ahh, good to know that my regular ISP got banned for something I have no clue about. Can't even read the blog.
I really wish admins banned based on actual behavior instead of IP address != residential/mobile.
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.
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]
Stupid, but it works.
Twitter had RSS feeds many moons ago:
* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
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...
just let me use the thing
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
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.
> 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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1r61jpo/all_youtub...
> 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 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.
It'll even randomly drop subscriptions. Forcing the user to resubscribe.
Thanks vibe coding?
Newpipe asks you if you want to delete the sub. I've lost Lots of subscriptions this way. Damn!
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.
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
We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight..."
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
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qc5PKbJ3tq4
Entirely possible it's the former.
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
Raises and promotions should never be correlated to busiest staff member.
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.
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.