I thought had this bud nipped, but enshittification is everywhere and ruins everything in time. I had a mere six months with my RSS feeds free from the scourge of Shorts, so imagine my surprise and anger when they started showing up again. This time, however, I'm not sure there's a way out.
In the above previous post I learned about the various magical and undocumented prefixes YouTube uses to filter videos. UULF had been the star of the show that allowed me to add a playlist of long-form videos to my RSS reader. No Shorts and no live or past streams ⸺ just the videos I wanted (which I suppose one could call "Normals") and nothing more. Well, I guess nothing good can last because UULF is no longer doing its job.
There are two playlist URLs I'm aware of, and as of this week or so, neither is letting UULF filter them to only Normals.
Playlist URL #1: /playlist?list=UULFeUNM9NqJqZXfRNeuW4_2sg
The first video is a Short of the second. Before a few days ago, this URL would not have shown it. As such my RSS reader is full of URLs like this, and none of them are working like they once did. It's some kind of infuriating.
Playlist URL #2: /feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFeUNM9NqJqZXfRNeuW4_2sg
I've highlighted the video titles in the XML to show that both the Short and the Normal are in there. God dammit.
Thinking the answer might be revealed in the network inspector, that maybe there was a new prefix that took over the job UULF once did, I looked into what YouTube was querying for when clicking the "Videos" button in the first screenshot above. The payload was unexpectedly gibberish ⸺ perhaps encrypted to prevent the snooping I was attempting to do.
Somehow I feel like there probably is a new prefix to get what I want, but since all of the currently known prefixes were found out by users rather than documented by YouTube, it may be some time before this information comes out. With 26 letters of the alphabet, there's merely 676 possible combinations of UUXX, so it'd take a script to check on the server response for each. I might just do that… However, I'm presuming that UU remains the initial two letters which it may not. If I had to run through all four letters I'd be looking at nearly half a million URLs to check!
In the meantime I've not found a solution, so this may be The End of using RSS to get YouTube content delivered to me. The standard channel subscription situation is out of the question: it's algorithmic and therefore unreliable by definition. Avoiding The Algorithm is the whole reason I've been using RSS! Thus, I called out into the void uselessly expecting and getting no response.
Earlier this year I found out how to remove Shorts from a YouTube channel's feed. chairmanbrando.org/post/187/rem… Six months later it has stopped working. The "UULF" playlist ID prefix that used to restrict it to only regular videos is including Shorts now. 😡 Anyone happen to know what's up?
— ❦ Brando 🇺🇦 (@chairmanbrando.org) November 8, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Until someone coughs up an answer or I manage to find a new playlist prefix myself, I guess I might as well try FreeTube. I linked to it in my previous post, but I didn't really want to switch to it because it seems like a YouTube-esque experience: everything ready for you to watch dropped into a single grid of videos with no organization possible. Seems like quite an annoying UX compared to folders of related YouTube channels presented in lists, but at this point what choice do I have?
Update 1: No new playlists found
Last night I wrote and ran a PHP script that checked the headers of the 626 combinations of UUXX playlists. I had the script wait three seconds between each request just in case, so this took over half an hour to complete! When the results were in, I found no new playlists. Every URL that worked matched the already known prefixes found here.
Thus, there's currently nothing one can do about Shorts infesting the once useful UULF playlist. There may still be one that doesn't start with UU, but checking 17,576 URLs for UXXX and 456,976 URLs for XXXX doesn't seem all that plausible. With the same three-second delay between requests as before, I'd be looking at scripts that takes about 14.6 hours and nearly 16 days to run.
Update 2: Was this a false alarm?
There's a few channels I follow that I know would have and did send me Shorts if they were included in their UULF playlist. Now, though? They're gone! It's like YouTube is gaslighting me specifically. The same URL as before no longer has buttons at the top to switch between "All", "Videos", and "Shorts":
See? The Shorts are just gone now; it's back to how it was from the time I found out about this playlist stuff up until a week or so ago. One would think the Shorts were never there, but I have documented evidence of it! I'm not crazy; it's YouTube that's the problem!