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.
Shhh no one tell spez there’s still RSS feeds
Reddit tried to remove https://i.reddit.com, but they forgot that you could 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”. :)
Yeah, probably malicious compliance :)
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.
Image hosting is i.redd.it
Reddit is dead to me
The only thing I’ve been missing is the ability to ask a specific community a specific question.
For example I just got done homebrewing my Wii, and whereas before there was a whole community of people who would have been able to help, now I’m sure a lot of those people have left including myself. The only useful things on Reddit now are old unarchived posts with dead links.
That being said, I like a lot better that way.
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.
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Yeah, RSS is alive and well. Sure, you aren’t getting full articles, but with a full brief and a leap into a browser with a reader view is a pretty slick experience.
Does the “reader” button in your browser redirect you to your rss reader, or are you just using the browser feature for readability? Because the second one does not need rss.
@django Yeah. I’m just using the reader view in the browser. Is it that web sites have reader views for individual articles but no longer update an index of some kind?
The reader view is not provided by websites, this is solely a browser function. They apply an algorithm to extract the content of the website and represent it in a readable way. If you are interested in this, the one used by firefox is available as a library: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
@django I obviously didn’t know that. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
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 features 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.
The masterclass link is blocked for me “unreviewed content” with a use the official app message.
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.
what do you use the most to scrape ? i’m thinking to learn scrapy.
Scrapy is really simple and straightforward.
You can start really fast.
I scraped literally everything :)
Personal hobbies, business wise,…
- Archiving niche websites and information
- Collecting real estate listings
- Analyzing all ad listings
- Checking web stores for product availability
- Getting different info (weather, traffic, map data)
Scripts, apps, databases, got data for a lot of stuff
I am now usually working with APIs, but still need scraping sometimes.
well don’t give then ideas
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.
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
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.
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.
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 modelsThe irony is that they’re breaking the ways that humans can interact with the site, but leaving many of the scraper-friendly options.
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.
For anyone interested this is how. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/
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.
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.
