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.

  • vortex@lemmy.ml
    32·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • bad_alloc@feddit.de
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • quortez@kbin.social
    30·
    2 years ago

    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’

  • Bilb!@lem.monster
    22·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de
      7·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • spiritusmaximus@kbin.social
        7·
        2 years ago

        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.

          • spiritusmaximus@kbin.social
            1·
            2 years ago

            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.

  • simonced@lemmy.one
    17·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Contend6248@feddit.de
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • aranym@lemmy.name
    16·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • EddyBot@feddit.de
      1·
      2 years ago

      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

      • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        The irony is that they’re breaking the ways that humans can interact with the site, but leaving many of the scraper-friendly options.

  • Xerø@infosec.pub
    14·
    2 years ago

    Yep I just finished setting up Feeder for the websites I read most and a few subreddits.

    • ddugue@lemmy.ca
      5·
      2 years ago

      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

  • Maffrow@lemm.eeEnglish
    14·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    10·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • giltwist@kbin.social
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • vermillion@kbin.social
    6·
    2 years ago

    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…