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.
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.
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”. :)
Yeah, probably malicious compliance :)
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
Ohh didn’t know about the .i, tysm! I knew of i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact and both have been killed.
Thank you!!! Now I can browse Reddit on my 3DS again
(that is, if I still actively used Reddit)
Reddit is dead to me
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
They might
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
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.
Thank you. Would you mind if i send you PM? Need to ask something relating to my job.
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?
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.
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.
For anyone interested this is how. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/
