YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken (opens in new tab)

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...

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

> 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)

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...

> Access to feeds from this network are restricted due to continued abuse of the service, which brings down the performance of feeds for everyone else. You'll need to use a verification token or use a different network to restore access

Ahh, good to know that my regular ISP got banned for something I have no clue about. Can't even read the blog.

I use a 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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

OpenRSS, your website is broken. I get:

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I'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.

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

When I go to the website it says: "Open RSS Sorry

We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight..."

This happens regularly, for a few hours every day.

At a company I was working for, we need to offer live stream detection to push notifications and keep a banner in app. One of the methods to detect was through the RSS channel feed, but it wasn't reliable, because some channels are listing their entries and others are not!

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

I have a bone to pick with the edited title this was submitted under.

The article’s title is “YouTube, your feeds are broken”. The word “RSS” was added to the submission title. That’s factually incorrect: YouTube feeds are Atom, and have been since at least 2009. Even if they have from early days even to this day had a terrible habit of incorrectly labelling the <link rel="alternate"> tags with type="application/rss+xml" and title="RSS" or similar.

(I hate RSS. Awful thing, should have died more than twenty years ago. For all domains outside outside the benighted world of podcasting where Apple ruined things, Atom is the strictly better choice, and has been for full twenty years.)

I 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.

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

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

this article hasn't been loading for me for about 3 hours, here's an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260506043414/https://openrss.o...

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.

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.

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.

Open RSS, your website is slow

my feed reader gets a 404/500 regularly with youtube feeds but i just assumed they were using those error codes instead of 429 for some reason

Just make your own RSS feed?

Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...

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.

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?

Shorts ruined the YouTube feeds.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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

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

When Youtube removed email notifications I had to build a RSS->email tool, I don't send mails for videos that have no duration (livestreams) and videos <1min.

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.

Well hi there chatgpt! I wonder if the person who couldn't be bothered writing this article actually had a point they wanted to make? I don't know because I stopped reading as soon as I recognised your fingerprint.

youtube had rss feeds? i built scrapers for nothing lol

>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.

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

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