this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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.

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[–] iuseit@iusearchlinux.fyi 36 points 1 year ago

Reddit is dead to me

[–] vortex@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year 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 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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'

[–] aeternum@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

it's spez. He'll say they're losing 200 trillion a year.

[–] bilb@lem.monster 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year 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.

[–] pkulak@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It should always be possible to scrape and make a feed. I use this at the moment: https://github.com/trashhalo/reddit-rss

[–] NightOwl@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be a fun project to learn how to make a web scraper.

[–] spiritusmaximus@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FuriousFrodo@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what do you use the most to scrape ? i'm thinking to learn scrapy.

[–] spiritusmaximus@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FuriousFrodo@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you. Would you mind if i send you PM? Need to ask something relating to my job.

[–] awwsom@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

well don't give then ideas

[–] simonced@lemmy.one 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year 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 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] Maffrow@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year 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.

[–] Xero@infosec.pub 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] ddugue@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year 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

[–] minnix@lemux.minnix.dev 2 points 1 year ago

That's good news

[–] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year 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.

[–] jeffjefferson@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

For anyone interested this is how. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/

[–] JoGooD@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Probably, but you will likely be able to use RSS Bridge to get an RSS feed anyway. Not very convenient though

[–] giltwist@kbin.social 6 points 1 year 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.

[–] Eggyhead@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How do you add a subreddit as an rss feed?

[–] Dankenstein@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss

[–] l0st_scr1b3@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Dankenstein@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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)

[–] Marduk@hammerdown.0fucks.nl 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] vermillion@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[–] cedarmesa@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How would I set up an rss feed of my reddit account?

[–] skepticalifornia@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] klempin@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] _I_@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] danc4498@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love Feedly. Been using it daily since the loss of Google reader

[–] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 2 points 1 year ago

My lifetime pro subscription is the longest-lived “lifetime” of any service I’ve ever paid for.

[–] ReclamationCrafts@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I couldn’t get Feedly to work. I tried to add a sub and initially content appeared but no new content is showing up.

[–] minnix@lemux.minnix.dev 4 points 1 year ago
[–] kaffeebohne@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

i would if was them.

[–] jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] corytheboyd@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago
[–] CookieJarObserver@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago
[–] twilightmeow@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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?

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