Shhh no one tell spez there's still RSS feeds
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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
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". :)
Yeah, probably malicious compliance :)
Thank you!!!!! Now I can browse Reddit on my 3DS again
(that is, if I still actively used Reddit)
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
Reddit is dead to me
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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It should always be possible to scrape and make a feed. I use this at the moment: https://github.com/trashhalo/reddit-rss
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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
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...
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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.
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.
I love Feedly. Been using it daily since the loss of Google reader
My lifetime pro subscription is the longest-lived “lifetime” of any service I’ve ever paid for.
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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
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.
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.
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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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.
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They might
i would if was them.
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