You may have just heard it from me first: I know a guy that knows a guy that says that the next upcoming self-inflicted injury on the Reddit site is an imminent removal of the “old.” prefix that has been used to un-fuck the interface and make it more bearably usable. They’re already bleeding out users, especially active content-creating users, so this will only accelerate evacuations of the carnival tents as the circus fire spreads.
If they kill old.reddit I suspect they also kill the .rss feeds, which will have a rather massive unintentional effect.
On reddit you can add /.rss/ to the end of literally any url on the site to convert the page to an rss feed. This then allows you to use it in an rss reader, or with certain other sites you can convert it to a webhook that will then enable you to do thinks like receive updates from that page instantly in a discord channel. For example
old.reddit.com/r/greenandpleasant/comments/gives me a stream of all comments made to the subreddit in real time right? If I make that URL inroold.reddit.com/r/greenandpleasant/comments/.rssthen use Zapier to convert that into a webhook, I can plug that webhook into any discord channel and I will receive instant updates in that channel for each comment in realtime.This works for /new/ /hot/ /top/ the homepage /all/ /popular/ it doesn’t matter. You can do it anywhere on the site to get that feed in realtime.
It’s an extremely useful and beneficial tool. One that is extensively used by powerusers and moderators. But also by other sites around the web that use it for keeping up with content. And community managers from various game companies rely on it for keeping up with things relevant to their brand. Several twitter feeds use this via IFTTT and Zapier. Huge amounts of systems rely on it.
All of this will disappear. And I suspect that newer employees at the company are completely unaware of the scale of the ecosystem that is built off of using this hidden feature of reddit’s design. The effect of this change will be larger than they anticipate.
This is a feature I’ve wondered about implementation into Lemmy @[email protected] by the way and have just never really remembered to raise it with you. Regardless of what anyone thinks of reddit it was always a rather genius feature of the site.
RSS feeds of the posts? Damn, that would be really useful for things like the megathreads. We’re still stuck with just RSS feeds of comms and inboxes.
Yeah it’s a really solid and robust system with far-reaching bonuses because of all the different ways you can use rss. I honestly credit it for a lot of reddit’s early success.
It’s most likely due to Swartz.
Yes absolutely, he developed web feed RSS itself.
creddit it
Arron Schwartz was the RSS guy. They nuke RSS they nuke what is left of him on the site, but it’s for the better. They sold their soul. He wouldn’t want part of that. Reddit is in a death spiral now. Let it rot. Back up what you want to remember. Even if that means copy pasting it in a doc or a catalog of archive links.
Arron was a smart one and for however much he was a techbro lib, probably libertarian type, he actually did real praxis that landed him in the sights of the feds which as a starting point for his politics would have placed him as our eventual ally over the years if he hadn’t been driven to kill himself.