2y ago

Will Reddit Kill RSS Feeds

I just set up all the subreddits I still want to following in Reeder, an RSS app. I'm able scroll through the posts ad free. It the occurred to me that this is a loss of revenue to Reddit. Could RSS be the new target for onerous fees?

It could be the case that RSS usage is small compared to 3rd party apps like Apollo so not of much concern. It also may be the case that it isn't possible for Reddit to charge for the usage. If they can't charge, they may just disable RSS altogether. I'm only guessing. I'll take off my tinfoil hat now.

82 comments

Shhh no one tell spez there's still RSS feeds
- Reddit tried to remove https://i.reddit.com, but they forgot that you could also access it by going to https://reddit.com/.i
  Wouldn't be surprised if they would remove RSS feeds but forgot they exist
  
  WTF? I never knew this existed.
  How can this still be there? They didn't rip out the code that generated this pages but only the redirects? I'm always surprised how shitty Reddit's development is.
  Either that or somebody was deliberately specificly resolving the issue "remove the .compact and i.reddit.com view". :)
  
  Thank you!!!!! Now I can browse Reddit on my 3DS again
  (that is, if I still actively used Reddit)
  
  Ohh didn't know about the .i, tysm! I knew of i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact and both have been killed.
  
  Never saw i.reddit.com, i thought they used that for image hosting. It needs a little touch-up but besides that it's very usable. Crazy.

Reddit is dead to me

TIL reddit has RSS feeds. Welp, I'll see if I can use it to plug in my favorites until they cut it for 'profit-seeking measures' and 'loosing 200 billion dollars a year'
- it's spez. He'll say they're losing 200 trillion a year.

Its only a matter of weeks now, days after the 1st of July. RSS feeds count as free access to the Reddit API and therefore unauthorized third party apps, so the're definitely be gone.
After the userbase has been conditioned to the fact that there isn't a 3rd party Reddit reader anymore, they will kill off old.reddit.com.
- The only non-infurating way to read reddit. If it's gone people who didn't care so far might actually feel inconvenienced and move out.

It's hard to imagine a practical reason to do so. This, however, has not been a good heuristic for determining what a CEO having a temper tantrum will do, so who the hell knows.
- There's an absolutely practical reason for doing it that's consistent with everything they've done so far - they want to control how we get to and see Reddit. So that they can advertise in the feed etc.
  RSS means you can skip the normal feed (where they would advertise) and go straight to the post.
  It's not a good idea - they seem to have forgotten that user hostile decisions reduce the number of users - but it does make sense in their twisted world. I'm amazed they still work.

I think eventually they will. They wish to put up their walled garden.
As for Their current RSS feed, it only grabs the post, right? Not the comments as well. That limits its usefulness a bit, depending on what you use reddit for.
- Yeah one major reason RSS has died is because content makers moved away from it as it bypassed their own sites advert serving, particularly if anything more than titles are shared. Reddit will go the same way. Also many content sites have moved to tricks to track and monetise users landing on their pages with share to facebook, facebook like, share to twitter etc buttons (which also passively track people just by a user loading a page with them on). Those all help feed the big tracking systems that social media companies like Facebook use to monetise users data by spying on them, profiling them and selling or using information for marketing; so RSS feeds also deminish that income source.
  Google has done it's part in this - it killed Google Reader which was a popular RSS reader. It wasn't a huge product but looking back it makes sense to kill it when it also wants to track people across the internet and also concerns it may have to pay content providers for their content.
- I used to have it set up so it gave me a personal RSS feed of replies to me. I don't remember the details because it was a really long time ago, but it was kind of cool and I pitched it to a couple other places that needed notifications but didn't have mobile apps (none bought in though).
  
  The Reddit RSS wiki entry explains basic use of the RSS and also links to a masterclass on advance use of the feature from 11 years ago . From the comments these features still currently work as of 5 months ago, and you can pull comment feeds but I'm not sure how useful it would be given how RSS works.

It should always be possible to scrape and make a feed. I use this at the moment: https://github.com/trashhalo/reddit-rss
- It would be a fun project to learn how to make a web scraper.
  
  that is only half the work/job, other half is learning how to avoid ban.
  I've been scraping 16+ years and it is easy till they get onto you and block you.

I don't think reddit has merit on blocking RSS, because you can't act on the posts, no comment, no upvote etc... You'll have to visit the site directly to do so. But I might be wrong, I just don't think it's their priority.
- Their major reason for this was that data can be scraped for free, so imagine RSS is a big data scraping interface, it will be gone or will get cut in terms of letters.

well don't give then ideas

Yep I just finished setting up Feeder for the websites I read most and a few subreddits.
- Do you have a good way to find rss feeds? I'm looking to emulate my own hacker news in terms of non-tech interesting articles, and sometimes I feel lost trying to find feeds to subscribe to
  
  For news sites and blogs built on wordpress (most of them are) you can just add /feed to the url. E.g fivethirtyeight.com/feed
- That's good news

At the current usage, I really doubt it. If a significant amount of people start using RSS readers as an alternative to the third party clients they were using previously, it's a possibility.
- It will depends on what traffic looks like in the first week of July. If the traffic in the official apps and web dips too much then they will have to hang on to everything that drives any traffic.
- More likely it depends if researchers of Largue Language Models (like in ChatGPT/GPT4, LLaMA, etc.) will use RSS feeds
  thats at least my idea because the API pricing is so drastic and high, Reddit was one of the biggest sources of these models
  
  The irony is that they're breaking the ways that humans can interact with the site, but leaving many of the scraper-friendly options.

I hope not but who really knows at this point? I imagine the amount of people following subreddits via rss is really small in the grand scheme of things so hopefully they don’t see a reason to kill them.

About 90% of my visits to reddit are via RSS (to read comments). If they remove it, I'll never visit except for reading my local town feed.

For anyone interested this is how. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/

Reddit has a feature where you can make an RSS feed of the subreddits that you follow. It's an RSS feed specific to my Reddit account. Currently, this is how I use Reddit and once they take it away, I'm done with Reddit.
It's nice to be able to scroll through the RSS feed which only contains the top posts of each subreddit. It also shows all the posts that get removed by mods...
- How would I set up an rss feed of my reddit account?
  
  Just go to your subreddit, copy the URL and add a .rss to the end, for example https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ becomes https://www.reddit.com/r/news.rss I've been doing this for years, using Protopage as my start page in Chrome and I make widgets with these RSS feeds. Lemmy and Kbin have RSS feeds as well, but you either just put in the URL and the RSS feeder recognizes it, or you click the little RSS icon by the sort selection and use that.
  
  I'm a bit late on this thread, but you have to go to https://old.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/. There you'll find multiple RSS feeds for your account.

I mean, the sites that get aggregated on Reddit themselves often have RSS feeds. That's what I've slowly been assembling. I can't get quite such the steady drip of information as I would directly from reddit, but I definitely don't feel like I'd be completely out of the loop if reddit vanished now.

How do you add a subreddit as an rss feed?
- put .rss on the end of the subreddit url and add to a reader. I made a multireddit containing all of my subs, and access it like this (the multireddit has to be marked public: https://www.reddit.com/user/username/m/multiredditname/.rss
- https://reddit.0qz.fun/r/news.json
  There are a lot of options but this site will turn the JSON into XML for RSS. If you want it in JSON format you can just use Reddit
  https://reddit.com/r/news.json
  Edit: Reddit also does RSS but it is kinda gross
  https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss
  
  Any links to things you can do with that JSON file? I don't really know Java but it'd be cool to mess around with it in Python some. Searching "reddit python JSON" is obviously not very helpful.

Probably, but you will likely be able to use RSS Bridge to get an RSS feed anyway. Not very convenient though

I suspect they will at some point. I used their RSS feeds for years but, whatever they choose to do now, it won't effect me anymore.

Is it really a loss in revenue if you used a 3rd party app previously?
If you want to bypass Reddit, why not just set up RSS for the things you get from Reddit instead? Most news sites have RSS. You could almost certainly find a feed for most of the stuff posted to Reddit.
- Most sites do not have RSS feeds now. I have to employ a lot of tricks to get RSS feeds for some sites I want.
- Thing with me is I don't want the raw stream of dozens of articles each day. I've used RSS feeds with Reddit for years now using the Top Week feed for each important subreddit. I haven't been able to find a way to get that sort of curated information stream anywhere else. Essentially I get around the top 12 articles/pictures/text-posts each day that real people think are actually important for each of my interests. Open to suggestions, though.
- Whether it's really a loss in revenue is not the relevant question to the people making decisions at Reddit. They're looking for sources of new revenue, and if they think they can monetize the feeds, then you know they will try.
  Also, there is a slight cost to maintaining them.

Fun fact: Feedly supports Reddit, and will list hot threads like any news article. Sure, you have to click the link to go to the thread, but you'll be able to choose which thread you want to engage with without a single ad.
- I love Feedly. Been using it daily since the loss of Google reader
  
  My lifetime pro subscription is the longest-lived “lifetime” of any service I’ve ever paid for.
- I couldn’t get Feedly to work. I tried to add a sub and initially content appeared but no new content is showing up.

i would if was them.

They might

Yes.

If reddit gets rid of their rss feeds then i'm absolutely done using that site. I already plan on staying away from reddit based on the api changes getting rid of my 3rd party reddit client. If they get rid of rss feed then I have no reason to use that site, nor would I want to anymore.
Speaking of which, does lemmy have rss feeds?

82 comments