You Should Be Using Reddit on Your RSS Reader

Credit: Lifehacker

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You may know that Reddit can be a treasure trove of useful information and opinion, and that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a clean and straightforward way to keep up with what's happening on the web—but you might not be aware that you can combine both Reddit and RSS in numerous ways.

Reddit actually has a variety of RSS integrations built in, so you can point your RSS reader straight to your subreddits of choice and keep up with the latest posts. The usual benefits of RSS apply: You get an uncluttered, customizable interface, free from ads and other extras, and which you can work through at your own pace.

If you're new to RSS, we've previously picked out a selection of the best clients to get you started, as well as spotlighting our favorites. These RSS apps give you rolling, chronological feeds of whatever websites (including Reddit) you point them towards, and they let you take in what you want to read at your own pace.

Getting started with Reddit and RSS

You can turn any subreddit into a feed for your RSS app by adding ".rss" to the end of it—so, for example, reddit.com/r/technology/ would become reddit.com/r/technology/.rss. That will give you a simple, reverse chronological feed of posts from the subreddit, with the newest submissions appearing at the top.

The same goes for comments in a subreddit, and for user feeds: All you need to do is add ".rss" to the end of the URL. If you wanted to see all the comments happening in the tech subreddit, for example, reddit.com/r/technology/comments/.rss would be the feed to plug into your RSS reader of choice.

You can use the ".rss" trick with a lot of Reddit URLs, but you don't always put it in the same place. If you want to keep tabs on a particular search term, for example, you can use a URL such as reddit.com/search.rss?q=lifehacker&sort=new for your RSS reader. That will return all the posts matching "Lifehacker" recently added to Reddit.

These feeds work in the same way to any other RSS feed you add to your client—you can search through them, bookmark them, and follow the links to read the post in full on Reddit (including its full selection of embedded media and comments).

Some RSS readers come with features specifically for Reddit. For example, Feedly is one of the best clients out there, and when you click the Follow Sources link in the Feedly web interface you'll see a Reddit tab—click this to add subreddits and searches directly, with no URL tricks required.

Keep on digging and you'll find there are a few more tricks you can do with RSS and Reddit. As pointed out by Robin Spielmann, you can use a few variables in your URLs: "sort" to sort the posts, "t" to pick when the posts are from, and "limit" to restrict how many posts get pulled through.

For example, plug reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=10 into your RSS reader to get the top posts from the technology subreddit today, with the number capped at 10. Bear in mind, though, that might give you some duplicates, if a post stays at the top for a while (depending on your RSS settings).

Want to combine different feeds together, that's also possible: Adding reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful+explainlikeimfive/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=5 will get you the top five posts from both r/dataisbeautiful and r/explainlikeimfive combined. It's a useful way of keeping in touch with what's happening on Reddit without necessarily trawling through everything on your go-to subreddits.

Some experimentation may be necessary, as Reddit's RSS support has tended to shift over the years. Adding reddit.com/hot/.rss to an RSS reader, for instance, seems to pull in some of the hot and trending posts from the platform's front page, but quite a lot more besides.

There are further steps you can take if you want to customize this further. IFTTT (If This Then That) lets you build custom Reddit feeds and then turn them into RSS feeds, while the Upvote RSS tool enables Reddit feeds to be customized by keywords, timings, upvotes, and more—though you will need your own PHP server to set it up on.