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.
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.
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
The irony is that they’re breaking the ways that humans can interact with the site, but leaving many of the scraper-friendly options.