Reddit RSS feeds recent rate limiting and solution | Hacker News Reader

Reddit RSS feeds recent rate limiting and solution

lapcatsoftware.com

41 pointszdw13 comments

It would help if Reddit used the standard Retry-After HTTP header, but otherwise I don't see why more than one request per minute is necessary for the expected use of RSS feeds.

I think the question is it a per-feed rate limit or an all-feeda rate limit. If the former then yeah, a complete non-issue. But if it is a global limit than for people following a decent number of feeds it can definitely be an issue.

> I think the question is it a per-feed rate limit or an all-feeda rate limit.

It's an all-feeds rate limit. This is also implied by the quoted comment:

"It looks like only the first request in each batch works, then the others fail."

It also follows from common sense. Why would all of the people who are seeing this problem be refreshing their feeds more than once per minute? I'm not aware of anyone who does this, and feed readers don't support it. Mine is once per hour. But 25 feeds is 25 requests within a minute.

Ironically, just loading https://www.reddit.com in a web browser is around 150 URL requests.

> Overall, I subscribe to around 25 Reddit RSS feeds

That's around 25 requests in less than a minute when the RSS reader refreshes feeds.

RSS feeds supposed to be the cheapest way to read data from your website, they are not pulling whole 10MB of javascript and other assets, but, yeah, let's block those. Everyone will just send their "llm agents" to pull data from regular website anyway.

The assets aren't a problem in 2026, they are in an edge cache.

The RSS feed can't be cached for long, and AI crawlers will be making millions of requests to these.

It's no wonder all my feeds are red. The internet is becoming so restricted! It's really sad.

Same with youtube. I only log into my Google account like once a month to check Gmail (it's not my daily driver), and I just "subscribe" to channels using RSS. But so often my feeds are red. Not always, but a lot of times at night (UTC-4) for sure.

Why are they all Reddit feeds?! =]

That explains quite a bit. I thought to myself that I've got less mail than usual today, and assumed one of my local cron jobs had failed. But now I noticed it's the Reddit feeds gone quiet.

Let it die. The internet will never evolve because people just bent over and took it when Reddit and Twitter closed themselves off and went hostile in 2023.

Twitter actually removed RSS support way back in 2012, and it did not die. So there's no evidence that Reddit would die either. RSS users are only a small % of their user base.

The enshittification continues as the garden is walled-off.

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