Reddit is killing RSS feeds and public API access, blaming AI scraping

Reddit unveiled a package of updates for moderators and developers on Wednesday, September 30, and the headline item is bad news for open-web supporters: the company is winding down RSS feeds, which will stop working on November 13.

In its announcement, Reddit said RSS had become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." The company added: "We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we're grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit."

What users and moderators lose

RSS (Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary) is a standard format that lets apps and users pull updates from a website. It became popular in the blogging era as a way to follow a site's new posts in a news reader. Google once ran the most popular such service but shut it down in 2013, ceding the market to Feedly and independent apps.

TechCrunch reports that Reddit now points moderators who relied on RSS alerts to the Discord Relay Devvit app and urges them to migrate their workflows before November 13. The company also said there is no replacement for RSS feeds used outside a moderator's own community. Moderators have pushed back: when Reddit hinted at the change earlier, many warned the platform would become unmanageable for them, while users said RSS was how they preferred to read Reddit.

The public API also goes away

Alongside RSS, Reddit will shut down public API access by March 2027. That affects any tool using programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, research tools and AI products such as assistants. Assistants that rely on Reddit to answer questions today will instead need commercial data deals with the company, and developers of approved third-party apps and bots must register them by January 12, 2027.

Paid data and tighter Old Reddit rules

The decision lands as Reddit's archive of user-generated content has turned into a profitable side business built on AI licensing deals. In its second quarter, Reddit said "other revenue" beyond advertising grew 24% year over year to $43 million.

Engadget reports a second change: Reddit will restrict the 21-year-old Old Reddit layout to recent users of the classic version. In an r/modnews update, the company said it will limit logged-in access "to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months." New accounts will no longer reach Old Reddit, and users who have not touched it in six months will lose access; logged-in moderators are exempt. Reddit said last month's move to restrict Old Reddit to logged-in users had already reduced automated abuse.

Reddit still has not said definitively whether it will abandon Old Reddit entirely. CEO Steve Huffman has said his "dream" for it would be to "recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on."

Sources: TechCrunch · Engadget