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.

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

Ohh didn’t know about the .i, tysm! I knew of i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact and both have been killed.

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

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”. :)

@Shinhoshi@infosec.pub
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122Y

Yeah, probably malicious compliance :)

Reef
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102Y

Thank you!!! Now I can browse Reddit on my 3DS again

(that is, if I still actively used Reddit)

_I_
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52Y

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
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42Y

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

Muddybulldog
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32Y

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

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

giltwist
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72Y

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.

corytheboyd
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22Y

Yes.

vermillion
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82Y

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
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32Y

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

@klempin@feddit.de
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12Y

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.

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.

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

som
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242Y

well don’t give then ideas

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.

deleted by creator

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.

Salastil
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42Y

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.

deleted by creator

Salastil
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82Y

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.

I’ve never used Google news. Would love an instruction on how to pipe a site that doesn’t have rss feeds through Google news.

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.

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

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.

Of course you can :) If we have PMs ('_)

haha. good thing. was not sure but checked in my instance, (vlemmy) there is an option to send message. let me know if you receive it.

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 models

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

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.

Bilb!
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302Y

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.

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.

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.

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