100% this — it would instantly bring a huge improvement to my feed, and it’s probably the main thing that would make me switch reader services.
Related threads:
- about filtering shorts globally: Global filters and ability to filter YouTube Shorts
- about the
/videosfeeds including shorts (which is an upstream issue as YouTube are trying to force shorts down everyone’s throats): Youtube link adds shorts instead of videos - #2 by sy8224
But, as a technical solution, the existence of the shorts-only feed is interesting. In the thread above @samuelclay was unsure whether account-wide filters would be too computationally expensive, but potentially it would be lighter to do something like the following:
- if the feed domain is
youtube.com, it’s recognised as a YouTube feed- potentially with an exception list for things like the YouTube blog
- for YouTube feeds, offer an additional option for ‘exclude shorts’
- in my opinion, this should default to true
- when that setting is enabled, also fetch the
/shortsfeed for the same channel (since the URL is predictable) and filter out any matching entries from the general feed (and theentry.idvalues in each feed match so that would be pretty trivial)
Having a site-specific setting might go against some design principles, but I would think for a platform as pervasive as YouTube and content as feed-polluting as shorts it would be worth making an exception in this case,