Tell HN: YouTube RSS feeds no longer work

4 days ago

Showing 404.

This really sucks.

I can see why they may not want to support such a niche feature but on the other hand I can't help feeling the hostility of this move.

  • I think it is because it is used by unofficial (i.e. privacy providing and ad skipping) apps.

This happens all of the time. It usually comes back in a few hours. But it has been very unreliable for the last week or two.

App idea: sumbit an OPML of YT channels. Scrape each for its blog or website. Find its subsequent rss. Return new OPML.

Derivative app: filter each rss feed, removing any post that is not video or multimedia (or just turning it into a media feed.)

For each: can be either client-side for 1 or cloud-enabled for many. Derivative app runs permanently.

-- For the main app, enable it to work on any number of websites where people are followed. Good for decoupling and de-silo'ing, and for bringing back rss.

A lot of people are doing this. Fandom (formerly wikia) has removed its RSS feeds as well.

I almost never use YouTube anymore. They seem less and less relevant.

  • "I see you enjoy cooking, ancient history and building terrariums. Would you also be interested in a couple of tiktok dance short videos?" ugh..

It's been incredibly spotty, it seems to be up for only a few hours each day.

It's surprisingly difficult to add a new YouTube feed to an RSS reader when it returns a 404 or 500 for most of the day. NetNewsWire just refuses to add it, for example. I would appreciate some kind of 'trust me bro' override, but it's sad that such a thing should even be necessary.

An easier solution might be to just run a local RSS mirror, to catch the YouTube feed in the sporadic windows when it does work. Easier still might be just to stop my remaining vestigial use of YouTube.