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.
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.
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.
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.
well don’t give then ideas
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.
Shhh no one tell spez there’s still RSS feeds
Reddit is dead to me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
For anyone interested this is how. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/
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.
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.
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.
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Of the top of my head, the local county news site doesn’t have RSS feeds so I have to pipe it through Google News.
https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=when:24h+allinurl:localnews.com&ceid=US:en&hl=en-US&gl=US
Same with Reuter’s webpage. I’m certain they DID have a feed at one point that was killed.
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.
