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.
Reddit is dead to me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
How do you add a subreddit as an rss feed?
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.
Oh you can just use something like this:
import requests
import json
json_string = requests.get(‘https://reddit.com/r/news.json’)
json_dict = json.loads(json_string)
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
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.
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.
