Comment by ajdude
8 hours ago
> 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.
I've had success marking any URL with /shorts/ in it as read. I use FreshRSS and its URL matching is pretty reliable.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032508
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.
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”?
Out of curiosity, are you filtering out shorts because of YouTube's terrible Shorts UI, or solely because of shorts' content quality?
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
Not OP, but because IMO shorts are mentally harmful. They're the mental equivalent of transfats-heavy foods.