YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

OpenRSS site and caching issues

  • Many visitors can’t read the article due to rate limiting, 429s, 502s, and “technical difficulties” messages.
  • Some suspect network- or ISP-level blocking (including CGNAT and corporate proxies), others say a refresh eventually works.
  • A 304 + empty body response suggests caching misconfiguration on OpenRSS’s side.

YouTube feed reliability and access

  • Multiple readers see YouTube channel feeds returning 404/500 regularly; some only discover this after months of missed digests.
  • Several report feeds “going down” for a few hours at about the same time each day, corroborated by a Reddit thread.
  • Some tools (MiniFlux, NewsBlur) still auto-discover feeds from channel URLs and offer multiple formats.
  • The <link> to the feed exists in channel HTML but may require a hard refresh because the SPA navigation hides it.

Shorts in feeds: strong disagreement

  • Many heavy RSS users dislike Shorts in feeds:
    • Consider them low-value, mentally harmful, or duplicate clips of longer videos.
    • UI problems (poor casting behavior, Shorts player, vertical video on large monitors).
    • Want feeds for “proper” long-form uploads only.
  • Others defend Shorts:
    • On followed channels, Shorts are seen as normal, often high-quality content.
    • Claim that user engagement is very high and that objecting to Shorts in a “videos feed” is unreasonable.

Shorts and livestream filtering techniques

  • URL-based filtering: ignore items whose URL contains /shorts/.
  • Duration-based rules: drop items <1 minute or “no duration” (livestreams).
  • One workaround: convert channel feed to a special playlist-based feed by replacing channel_id=UC… with playlist_id=UULF… to mostly get long-form videos; a similar UUSH prefix is mentioned for Shorts-only but noted as unverified.
  • Some rely on scripts that probe youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID to detect Shorts.
  • Others build or use specialized readers (e.g., Serial, Aggly) that split or filter Shorts vs. videos.

RSS vs Atom terminology

  • Several point out that YouTube actually serves Atom, not RSS, though it is often mislabeled as RSS.
  • Some argue “feed” is the best neutral term; others say “RSS” has effectively become generic and pedantic distinctions are pointless.

Broader platform complaints and ideas

  • Frustration with YouTube’s algorithmic feeds, intrusive homepage, unreliable notifications, dropped subscriptions, ads, buffering, and lack of API access to Watch History / Watch Later.
  • Some fear public attention could motivate Google to remove feeds entirely, given their conflict with engagement-driven design.
  • Various users describe elaborate setups (MiniFlux, cron jobs, yt-dlp, RSS→email) to reclaim control, and propose features like text summaries or even micropayment-enabled feeds.