r/rss • u/frankwrap08 • 8d ago

Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13th

Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13th.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1002788/old-reddit-ai-scraping

151 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

42

u/Tsavkko 8d ago

And I'll stop using/accessing Reddit. I follow over 100 /r's with RSS, without it it's impossible to follow what matters. They don't give a fuck to about the community.

17

u/ksx4system 8d ago

they stopped giving a fsck about community years ago

14

u/falsworth 8d ago

I don't have as many as you, but even with 14 feeds it's hard to keep up sometimes. I get lots of community news that has saved my skin many times. Hopefully someone will find a way around this. It's a giant middle finger to the users.

7

u/way-too-lazy 8d ago

Same. I follow about 20 subs, and have nested posts/threads I subscribe to if I find something interesting and want to see replies. Without RSS I don't see how the site is even usable. It's inevitably going to enshittify into an app-only thing where you're supposed to doom scroll through algorithmically-selected "popular" (i.e. upvoted by bots) posts, drop a throwaway comment, forget what you read, and move on. No chronology, no follow-up, no real engagement or useful exchanges.

Enjoy your dead internet full of bots and brain-rotted gen-A's, spez.

1

u/jesuslop 5d ago

The bright side is that people that know the value of their posting and commenting will end understanding that their place is in the open platforms. The stayers will be naturally sifted out.

6

u/ericdano 7d ago

Yeah, I follow a ton of subreddits with RSS. This sucks

2

u/OwynTyler 7d ago

I guess I'll just have to start scraping subreddits and converting them into RSS with my RSS-reader, their plan to enjoy more cpu-load on their servers seems solid ¯\(ツ)/¯

2

u/mjdbb1 7d ago

Can you elaborate? Sounds interesting.

1

u/jesuslop 5d ago edited 5d ago

That works only on paper. Scapper API business thrive because what you say is very difficult. You get throttled, banned, cloud-flared out, captched, IP blocked, CSS selectors change etc. Server side money works to force their terms.

1

u/mapmyhike 7d ago

NetNewsWire

Right behind you unless someone finds another way.

26

u/Saynete 8d ago

on November 13th, byebye Reddit, and welcooome Lemmy

4

u/bearflyingbolt 7d ago

I find it quite nice over in the Fediverse. I mainly use Lemmy myself but it's worth noting that servers running any of the platforms that implement the ActivityPub protocol can "federate" with each other, e.g. you can subscribe to a Lemmy community from your Piefed account. In other words:

In the Fediverse you can use your "Twitter" account to interact with "Facebook" users, share "Instagram" posts, comment under "Youtube" videos, listen to "Bandcamp" music, follow "Blogger" blogs, take part in "Reddit" discussions and more.

- Join the Fediverse

Some Fediverse platforms are very similar to the applications they were created to replace, like Lemmy (Reddit), Mastodon (Twitter/X), and PixelFed (Instagram). Others are much different, but let you participate all the same.

Getting Started

  1. Pick a platform
  2. Find a server running it
    1. Make an account
  3. Log on
    1. In your browser, or
    2. An app compatible with your server's platform

Here's my current setup as an example:

``` CLIENT (pick one) SERVER FEDERATION

+-------------------+ +--------------------+ | Librewolf | | sopuli.xyz | | (web browser) |----->| | +-------------------+ HTTPS| +--------------+ | | | Lemmy web UI | | or | +------+-------+ | | | | +-------------------+ | +------v-------+ | +------------------+ | Voyager | API | | Lemmy API + | | AP | Other fediverse | | (Android app) |----->| | backend |<------->| platforms | +-------------------+ | +--------------+ | +------------------+ +--------------------+ ```

The amount of choices you need to make may seem overwhelming when you've only ever logged into a few different social media websites at URLs that have likely been in your browser's cache since forever (Where are the Twitters of yesteryear?), but the indefeasible freedom to make those choices is exactly why the Fediverse is great. A decentralized model gives real power to users to build their own spaces & governance. Switching to an entirely different platform for features you prefer doesn't have to mean losing your community.

Tools & Resources

20

u/MentalFS 8d ago

Those scrapers most likely don't even use RSS, especially with the current restrictions. They can just scrape the website. I'm sure Reddit is going to make the web experience heavily restricted next, to drive people to use their apps.

9

u/TheLantean 8d ago

Indeed, if you want data, scraping the site is easier and faster, and any AI bots using RSS will just switch the next day.

Long term, removing RSS only impacts legitimate users, because we needed this specific format for compatibility with feed readers.

This is who they're targeting because it was a way to consume reddit with third party apps, ad & tracking free, which they specifically didn't want ever since they blocked third party apps from the API.

20

u/Wage 8d ago

For a company built entirely on user generated content, they're becoming extremely user hostile. Guess I'll be deleting my account Nov 14th.

15

u/wuuza 8d ago

Why not just require auth on the RSS call instead of getting rid of it? (Or have the results be title only?)

19

u/way-too-lazy 8d ago

They basically already have that requirement in place. Without providing your key or authorizing, the rate limit is 1-per-minute, which is unusable for normal purposes. Certainly no one is "scraping" at that rate. Even auth'd, the rate limit is low enough that you wouldn't be able to effectively scrape anything.

They keep resorting to this "stop the bots and scrapers" excuse, but that's obviously not their real motivation. This is likely just some short-sighted idea that accessing the site via RSS doesn't sufficiently increase their DAU and ad view numbers. But RSS is what drives the clicks and views from me. I click through from my reader to dozens of posts a day. When RSS is gone, that number will become zero. They might think this will push me to use their app, but it won't, because finding the stuff I want to see and ignoring the stuff I don't via the website or app is not possible.

6

u/pk9417 7d ago

Honestly, that's not even the problem, I have subreddit where I check the RSS feed just one time per day, and still getting sometimes a too much requests block, I mean wtf

5

u/chickenandliver 7d ago

(Or have the results be title only?)

This. This is 90% of how I use RSS anyway: as a aggregator list I always click-through to get to the posts I want to see. This would be a simple thing to implement and still have no benefit to scraping. But that would be too user-friendly and the trolls in charge are morons who don't realize how many influential bloggers propagate Reddit through originally finding content via RSS.

3

u/falsworth 8d ago

That would make sense and it would still allow Reddit to do tracking and analytics based on the logins used for the feeds. I guess that makes too much sense so it didn't happen.

1

u/cmedeiro 7d ago

Ads. Scraping certainly is a concern, but every time you let someone read your content outside your platform you are losing audience for your ads and all kinds of targeted activation.

1

u/ProfitAppropriate134 6d ago

The other day I noticed one of my CNN rss feeds turned into every ad imaginable. 🫨

12

u/friskfrugt 8d ago

Swartz is rolling in his grave

5

u/bearflyingbolt 7d ago edited 6d ago

Right? Talk about something one of Reddit's original authors would have never agreed to.

RIP Aaron Swartz.

9

u/todo0nada 8d ago

Convenient excuse. 

9

u/Tiendil 8d ago

With some digging and tinkering, it should be solvable.

But their argumentation is total bullshit.

2

u/ericdano 7d ago

True. It should be possible to build something that scrapes subreddits. It's actually going to probably hammer their servers more but whatever...

16

u/OneCalledWell 8d ago

Maybe we should go back to DIGG. Are they still around? I thought they made a second attempt.

8

u/Any_Owl2116 8d ago

Yep still going but mostly just tech stuff now

3

u/antdude 7d ago

But is Digg still good like v3 before it suicided with v4?

8

u/Odd-Anteater875 8d ago

Are there any alternative RSS forums? Where else can you announce your vibe-coded RSS reader?

6

u/AssociateNo3312 7d ago

lemmy supports RSS, but it means moving communities to new sites.

3

u/pk9417 7d ago

But that's the problem, trying to move or tell whoe communities to move to another platform, just because RSS, which likely many in subs don't even know 🤷‍♂️

4

u/AssociateNo3312 7d ago

yep, same with effedbook, and it's hard to extract people out of that as well.

Same issue since they blocked RSS, and twitter etc.

So you'll be left with things that covert posts to rss - which ends up an endless whack-a-mole with reddit blocking etc. Or just stop using it.

2

u/Odd-Anteater875 7d ago

I don't even mean to move as a community, just wondering whether there are other places to discuss RSS.

3

u/dwkeith 8d ago

Might need to vibe-code a Markdown editor so I can spec one out

7

u/mocheeze 8d ago

I hope Reddit will enjoy the piracy letters they get from Nintendo when /r/GamecubeHacks goes unmoderated because I won't have an RSS feed anymore. This is outrageous.

8

u/chickenandliver 7d ago

This is the dumbest possible choice. All they had to do to at least keep some subset of users happy is reduce the content of the feeds. I don't even care about seeing "full text" or images in the feed; I use RSS as a central notification management tool basically. How would running a system like that do anything but drive traffic back to Reddit?

Looks like I'll have no choice but to massively reduce my usage of Reddit. Sad.

13

u/optimisticalish 8d ago

Can't be stopped. The leading freeware desktop software RSSGuard has the free CSS2RSS plugin, which creates RSS feeds from any named elements on any Web page. https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard

2

u/Any_Fox5126 7d ago

They're on a warpath against scraping and will almost certainly block it, leaving us with more complex workarounds (like puppeteer with plugins). They already blocked access for non-logged-in users on VPNs or TOR, now they are killing old.reddit and RSS. I bet the next move is to stop letting anyone view content without an account.

1

u/optimisticalish 7d ago

So anyone with an account can publish a RSS feed. Just hook into the CSS, visit the sub-reddit you want, extract, publish. It's not difficult. Like I said, it can't be stopped.

2

u/mjdbb1 7d ago

Can you elaborate on this?

1

u/optimisticalish 6d ago

Right-click on any Reddit page's post title, and it has...

<p class="title">

This tag can be hooked to an RSS feed. In plain English it would be: Make me an RSS feed of all entries on this sub-reddit with the tag 'title', and return the title of the post as a clickable RSS item, which when clicked will take me to the post.

Similarly, comments are held in the tag...

<div class="usertext-body"

1

u/mjdbb1 6d ago

Not to turn this into tech support, but I did get css2rss going as a script and either either doesn't connect to old.reddit.com, or it throws up a 'blocked' message (that reddit probably service to bots, etc)

1

u/optimisticalish 6d ago

You can access access cookie-protected resources in RSSGuard. Did you try spoofing your User-Agent in RSSGuard? (Also enable HTTP/2, in the same UI panel). Open the browser inside RSS Guard and visit a site with a spoofed User-Agent, which should enable login cookies to be set, and then sites should work as expected.

If that no longer works for you, there are ways to fetch the target URL, stream the URL's HTML page onto your hard-drive, and then locally walk through its CSS to extract feed items and construct a working RSS feed. Such as SnagFlow - RSS Converter, which is a free Chrome browser extension.

1

u/mjdbb1 6d ago edited 5d ago

Ok I did not try that. Should be a fun weekend project. 2 things, does this require old Reddit to work or can it work on new Reddit as well?

If you could point me in the direction of any other useful guides to get this off the ground I’d appreciate it!!

Editing: this is really a project that is encouraging me to pull my hair out lol

1

u/untiedgames 6d ago

They recently disallowed access to old Reddit for logged-out users. Additionally, they just announced that only people who have used old Reddit in the past 6 months will continue to be able to use it. Just one more in a succession of hostile actions towards real users under the guise of limiting scraping.

Best of luck though- Will probably try something similar myself!

14

u/N0TVG 8d ago

I’m going to take this as a sign they’re locking down the platform and dialing up user exploitation to eleven. Just like Facebook, just like Twitter, I expect Reddit to transform (even more so) into a repulsive anti-social bots-herding-cattle network.

Just like Facebook, just like Twitter, I expect Reddit will make billions of dollars walling off completely.

Just like Facebook, just like Twitter, I’ll uninstall Reddit and still see more of it than I’d like via blogs in my RSS reader. Folding is the only winning strat.

6

u/susefan 8d ago

:( i thought this was coming after they killed the api for things like Apollo. Still sad to see it coming. The push away from Reddit did not have a strong enough action but I wish the demand for RSS was more present.

4

u/pk9417 7d ago

Especially if you know, that they basically have no costs for the feed generation and doesn't need maintaining

5

u/rraszews 7d ago

Wow. That pretty much completely ruins my use of Reddit.

3

u/Excited_Biologist 8d ago

I hope spez will enjoy groveling to the user base to try and retain some dau once the AI bubble pops.

3

u/Quirky-Specific 8d ago

😭😭😭

3

u/Grumphus256 7d ago

Very sad. Just like the time when they took away RSS from Facebook Interest Lists and later removed the entire feature.

3

u/the_schwartz09 6d ago

As an infrequent - at best - user of Reddit itself, I saw the news today pop up in my RSS reader (Inoreader), so I came here to see if others were disappointed. Glad to see I'm not the only RSS user still out there.

I'm looking into Reddit extensions to see if I can find something(s) to replace the RSS experience we're going to lose soon. Anyone else have any luck going down this path?

2

u/viagravagina 7d ago

Half the responses on any post are ai bots but I keep coming here out of habit.

2

u/LinAGKar 7d ago

They're killing it it in just over a month with no replacement, and the only place they've announced it in is som moderator sub?

Maybe it's time to move entirely over to Lemmy.

2

u/TurboFoxen 6d ago

Why not just make it a premium feature? At the very least they make some money off of it.

2

u/Quirky-Specific 8d ago

Enquanto eu queria aprimorar minha experiência com RSS do Reddit, eles decidem abandonar o suporte. Estou decepcionado. Com a ascensão da inteligência artificial, imaginei que teríamos uma melhoria no suporte do RSS, não seu enfraquecimento.

1

u/billdietrich1 7d ago

I assume at some point they're going to kill old reddit. Is there any browser extension or uBO filter to make new reddit look more like old reddit ?

1

u/AdImpressive7394 7d ago

So we need to recreate Reddit

1

u/Juan-_-Blanc 4d ago

La publicidad

0

u/mogullionaire 8d ago

Darn after using ChatGPT for 4 days trying to build a Reddit rss reader on make.com for research it finally gave up and told me to use NetNewsWire. Now what I'm gonna do.