Reddit RSS Functionality Explained

I’m a huge fan of both Reddit and RSS, but it’s not super clear how they work together.

me reddit 2020

The old version of Reddit used to show all your RSS options very clearly, as you see below, but that functionality is now hidden in the new interface.

How old reddit used to show RSS feeds

I think they want you on the site, not in a news reader.

But while those options aren’t shown anymore, the RSS feeds still mostly work. So here’s a list of them in one place.

Reddit URL schemes

The most basic trick (that pretty much works everywhere) is to simply add .rss to the end of any URL.

reddit.com/r/technology/.rss

Using that basic scheme, you can actually do quite a bit using Reddit’s own built-in URLs.

These work in a browser as well, not just via RSS.

/r/technology/top
/r/technology/hot
/r/technology/new
/r/technology/rising
/r/technology/controversial

A little-known one is that you can filter by domain.

reddit.com/ycombinator.com/.rss

Reddit filtering options

You can filter by the number of results you want to get back.

// Limit the results to 25

/r/technology?limit=25

You can ask for results before or after a certain post.

// Useful if you need to pull a lot of results

/r/technology?after=t3_15bfi0

Putting it all together

And—most importantly—you can combine these options.

// Get the top 50 results from the /r/netsec sub, as RSS

reddit.com/r/netsec/top/.rss?limit=50

// Get the fastest rising results from the /r/technology sub, as RSS

reddit.com/r/technology/rising/.rss

Don’t do this unless you hate people, or plan to.

// Get the top 10 most controversial posts in the /r/philosophy sub, as RSS

reddit.com/r/philosophy/controversial/.rss?limit=10

Summary

So that’s it.

You can add .rss to the end of any Reddit URL and get the RSS feed for it.
You can view any sub using many different views, including top, rising, most controversial, etc.
You can then filter those further with limits of how many results you get.
You can combine these options to build your own URLs.

Example URLs

Notes

You can still get a list of your own private feeds here, but I don’t know how long that will last since they hid it in the new interface.
You can combine before, after, and count to do pagination.