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ymeskhout  2yr ago (text post)   1601 thread views

RSS Support?

You know it's really me because who else would care about RSS. Although Reddit was originally built with explicit RSS support the nested nature of the weekly culture war thread required a slight bit of jury-rigging to show only top-level comments. So the RSS URL for the last thread looked like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wulqxp.rss?depth=1

I tried adding the culture war thread from here into Feedly but it doesn't seem to recognize the format, and instead prompts me to use a paywalled feature to build custom RSS feeds. Can the rdrama code base support RSS?

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Took me a while to find this info on the RSS feed. I have two suggestions to improve discoverability

  1. Add a link to the RSS feed on the home page

  2. Add whatever meta tags are required to the home page such that the RSS feed can be auto-discovered by RSS agents

I think (1) shouldn't be necessary once (2) is done; most RSS-capable sites don't seem to actually call it out anywhere anymore.

I've got a bug filed for 2, though!

There's https://www.themotte.org/rss but as near as I can tell that's it. In theory we absolutely could add any RSS thread you want, but right now we're pretty crushed on time; if you can either implement it yourself or convince a friendly coder to do it, we're happy to merge it in, but it's gonna take a while otherwise.

That said, if you can write up the exact thing you want - "all top-level comments for the culture war threads"? - I'll toss it into our long-term plans.

"all top-level comments for the culture war threads" is accurate. I attached what the RSS feed I made looked like in Feedly.

The way we have this implicitly organized is a relic of how Reddit was built, and it doesn't necessarily have to continue the same way. We use the weekly CWR thread as a sort of "sub-forum" with each top-level comment functionally the same as a forum thread. I remember you saying how part of that is intentional, because you want people to accidently meander into a topic they might not have otherwise read. RSS feeds don't interfere with that, and in fact make me pay attention to each post much more.

With RSS feeds, I just plug it into Feedly and everything is delivered straight to my front door, and I don't have to worry about keeping track of what is and isn't read/unread. I'm actually very curious to know how people browsed the Motte without RSS, because the only alternative is "maybe I'll see if something is new at the Motte"

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