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.
@BananaTrifleViolin @curt @iter_facio In what way has it “died”? I visit all sorts of web sites using a mobile browser, tap the “reader” button, and get the RSS version of the page, minus ads as expected. Are there lots of sites that have removed it? I haven’t run into them….
Yeah, RSS is alive and well. Sure, you aren’t getting full articles, but with a full brief and a leap into a browser with a reader view is a pretty slick experience.
Does the “reader” button in your browser redirect you to your rss reader, or are you just using the browser feature for readability? Because the second one does not need rss.
@django Yeah. I’m just using the reader view in the browser. Is it that web sites have reader views for individual articles but no longer update an index of some kind?
The reader view is not provided by websites, this is solely a browser function. They apply an algorithm to extract the content of the website and represent it in a readable way. If you are interested in this, the one used by firefox is available as a library: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
@django I obviously didn’t know that. Thanks for taking the time to explain.