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.

  • vortex@lemmy.ml
    35·
    1 year 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
      3·
      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
    34·
    2 years ago

    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’

  • Bilb!@lem.monster
    30·
    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
      7·
      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.

  • iter_facio@lemmy.one
    30·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
      12·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      7·
      2 years ago

      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).

      • spiritusmaximus@kbin.social
        10·
        1 year 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
            1·
            1 year 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.

  • Xerø@infosec.pub
    21·
    1 year ago

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

  • simonced@lemmy.one
    19·
    1 year 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
      3·
      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.

  • Maffrow@lemm.eeEnglish
    16·
    2 years 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.

  • aranym@lemmy.name
    16·
    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.

    • EddyBot@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year 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
        1·
        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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      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.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    9·
    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.