How to Use RSS to Subscribe to Subreddits on Reddit

To add a subreddit to your RSS client, follow the following steps:

1: take the URL of the subreddit, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/.

2: replace the trailing slash by .rss, e.g.:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS.rss

This is the default RSS feed for the subreddit, which is probably NOT what you want.

Subreddit's RSS Feeds

The default RSS feed of a subreddit is the same as the default view of a subreddit. In other words, since subreddits display the hottest posts by default, if you add the URL above to your RSS client you'll get the hottest posts delivered to your RSS client all the time.

Unfortunately, this isn't very helpful. That's because the way the "hot" algorithm works is that it takes in consideration how new a thread is, i.e. its "freshness." The RSS feed contains 25 items by default. The bottom items will be fresher but have fewer upvotes.

This would make sense if we were viewing the subreddit in a web browser, but we have the power of RSS in our hands now, we don't need weird algorithms that mix two attributes together. We can simply subscribe directly to the feed of threads by chronological order, or the feed that gives us the most upvoted posts.

RSS Feed for Newest Posts of a Subreddit

To subscribe to the newest posts of a subreddit, add new/.rss after the subreddit URL. For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/new/.rss

RSS Feed for Top Posts of a Subreddit

To subscribe to the top posts of a subreddit, add top/.rss after the subreddit URL, and a ?t= query with value hour for hourly, day for daily, week for weekly, month for monthly, year for yearly, or all for all time.

For example, to subscribe to the daily top posts, the URL would be:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/top/.rss?t=day

To subscribe to the weekly top posts, the URL would be:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/top/.rss?t=week

To subscribe to the monthly top posts, the URL would be:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/top/.rss?t=month

The values for the t query parameter are the same as in the web version. That is, if you view a subreddit by top posts, and change the dropdown list button to yearly so it shows the top posts of this year, the URL will be top/?t=year.

If you add these URLs, make sure to adjust the update frequency of your RSS client accordingly. For example, if you add the URL that gets you the most upvoted posts of the week, there is no point in setting a frequency that checks the RSS feed every hour. Make your client check the feed weekly instead in that case.

RSS Feed for Rising Posts of a Subreddit

For completeness:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/rising/.rss

RSS Feed for Hot Posts of a Subreddit

Although the default should work, you can also use:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/hot/.rss

Subscribing to /r/all Using RSS

The URL patterns above also seems to work with /r/all, but considering most of the content on Reddit is [redacted], I recommend not subscribing to /r/all.