You Should Use Reddit in Your RSS Feed.
You may know that Reddit can be a treasure trove of useful information and opinions, and that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy and convenient way to stay up to date with what’s happening on the internet, but you may not know that Reddit and RSS can be combined in a variety of ways.
Reddit has numerous built-in RSS integrations, allowing you to direct your RSS reader directly to the subreddits of your choice and stay up-to-date with the latest posts. You still get the typical benefits of RSS: a simple, customizable interface, free of ads and other unnecessary elements, that you can use at your own pace.
If you’re new to RSS, we’ve previously rounded up the best clients to get you started, as well as shared our favorites . These RSS apps provide you with continuous chronological feeds of any website (including Reddit) you point them to, allowing you to read what you want at your own pace.
Getting Started with Reddit and RSS
You can turn any subreddit into a feed for your RSS app by appending “.rss” to the end—for example, reddit.com/r/technology/ becomes reddit.com/r/technology/.rss . This will give you a simple feed of posts from the subreddit in reverse chronological order, with the newest posts at the top.
The same applies to subreddit comments and user feeds: all you need to do is add “.rss” to the end of the URL. For example, if you want to see all comments in a technology subreddit, you would add the feed to your RSS reader using reddit.com/r/technology/comments/.rss.
You can use the “.rss” extension with many Reddit URLs, but you don’t always need to place it in the same location. For example, if you want to track a specific search query, you could use a URL like reddit.com/search.rss?q=lifehacker&sort=new for your RSS reader. This will return all recently added Reddit posts matching the query “Lifehacker.”
These feeds work just like any other RSS feeds you’ve added to your app—you can search them, bookmark them, and follow links to read the full version of a Reddit post (including all embedded media and comments).
Some RSS readers have features specifically designed for Reddit. For example, Feedly is one of the best clients on the market, and when you click the ” Subscribe to sources” link in the Feedly web interface, you’ll see a Reddit tab. Click it to add subreddits and search queries directly, without having to enter URLs.
Setting up Reddit RSS feeds
Keep exploring, and you’ll discover a few more tricks for working with RSS and Reddit. As Robin Spielman noted, you can use several variables in URLs: “sort” to sort posts, “t” to select the post source, and “limit” to limit the number of posts loaded.
For example, enter reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=10 into your RSS reader to get a list of the top posts from the technology subreddit today, with a limit of 10 posts. However, keep in mind that this may result in duplicates if a post remains at the top of the list for a long time (depending on your RSS reader settings).
Want to combine different feeds? That’s possible too: adding reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful+explainlikeimfive/top/.rss?sort=top&t=day&limit=5 will get the top five posts from both r/dataisbeautiful and r/explainlikeimfive. It’s a convenient way to stay up-to-date on Reddit without browsing through your favorite subreddits.
Some experimentation may be necessary, as Reddit’s RSS support has changed over time. For example, adding reddit.com/hot/.rss to your RSS reader seems to allow access to some popular and relevant posts from the platform’s main page, as well as much more.
For further customization, you can take additional steps. IFTTT (If This Then That) allows you to create custom Reddit feeds and then convert them to RSS feeds, while the Upvote RSS tool allows you to customize Reddit feeds by keywords, post time, upvote count, and more—though you’ll need your own PHP server to set it up.