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dawidpotocki

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...

Cieric

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.

BagelsOverBread

(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/

jraph

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

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...

jraph

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.

bthallplz

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

nickff

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

I have not verified this.

account42

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

adrianwaj

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

pavel_lishin

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

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

Can we not do things for fun anymore?

adrianwaj

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?

xyst

Got to feed the Google graveyard somehow

aendruk

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...

hales

> 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)

qmarchi

> 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.

RugnirViking

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

I got that at first but it worked after a refresh. So it doesn't look like an actual ban.

notsylver

I use a medium sized Australian ISP and got the same, maybe they just have whole regions blocked...?

jerf

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.

jamiecurle

I'm also blocked, but I'm in the UK use a fairly niche and small ISP (uno.uk)

TonyTrapp

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

protoster

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

> 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...

Pay08

I thought they already did a decade ago.

bronlund

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.

kulahan

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?

sheept

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.

krembo

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

Esn024

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...

rayill

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

scbzzzzz

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

fusslo

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

just let me use the thing

flaviolivolsi

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

renegat0x0

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

Hidden is a pretty reasonable synonym for "not visible".

account42

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

renegat0x0

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

billdybas

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...

ajdude

> 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.

dflock

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

unbolted3032

I've had success marking any URL with /shorts/ in it as read. I use FreshRSS and its URL matching is pretty reliable.

arjie

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.

max-m

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”?

bookofjoe

[dead]

sheept

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

theshrike79

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

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.

BagelsOverBread

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

abelitoo

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

Narishma

Why not both?

botanical

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.

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