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.

  • Bilb!@lem.monster
    0·
    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
      0·
      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.

  • _I_@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • vortex@lemmy.ml
    0·
    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
      0·
      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.

      • spiritusmaximus@kbin.social
        0·
        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
            0·
            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.

  • noodle@feddit.uk
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    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.

  • simonced@lemmy.one
    0·
    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
      0·
      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
    0·
    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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • EddyBot@feddit.de
      0·
      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
        0·
        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.

  • twilightmeow@beehaw.org
    0·
    2 years 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?

  • Xerø@infosec.pub
    0·
    2 years ago

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