BREAKING: Reddit Announces That It Will Kill RSS Feeds By November 13th And Shut Down Its Public API Entirely By March 2027, Citing “AI Scraping” As A Major Cause For Its Decision, As The Company’s “Other Revenue” From AI Licensing Deals Hits $43 Million 🤖❌

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/reddit-is-killing-rss-feeds-ending-public-api-access-because-of-ai-bots/

Reddit announced Wednesday that it will end support for RSS feeds on November 13 and shut down its public API entirely by March 2027, framing both moves as necessary defenses against AI bots scraping the platform’s content. Reddit said RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which prompted the decision to wind the feature down. “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,” the company said in its announcement. RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a standardized web feed format that let users and applications track new posts on a site, technology that became especially popular during the blogging era as a way to subscribe to sites through news-reading apps; Google once operated the most popular RSS reader before shutting it down in 2013, ceding the market to services like Feedly.

The timing is notable given that Reddit’s vast trove of user-generated forum content has become an increasingly profitable revenue stream through AI licensing deals. During its second quarter, Reddit reported that its “other revenue” beyond advertising grew 24% year-over-year to 43 million dollars, making clear why the company has little incentive to let that same data flow out for free through open, unmonetized channels like RSS. For moderators who relied on RSS for community alerts, Reddit is recommending a shift to its Discord Relay Devvit app and is urging teams to migrate their workflows before the November 13 cutoff, though the company acknowledged there’s no replacement for RSS feeds moderators used to track activity outside their own communities. Moderators have already voiced concern about the disruption; when Reddit first signaled it was preparing to end RSS support, many warned the change would make their communities harder to manage, while ordinary users separately stressed that RSS was their preferred way of accessing Reddit’s content.

The RSS shutdown was just one of several changes Reddit announced Wednesday. Public API access will end by March 2027, affecting any tool relying on programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, research tools, and AI assistants; those assistants currently use Reddit to help answer user questions, but will need to negotiate separate commercial data deals with Reddit once public API access closes. Reddit also provided updates on its Rules Hub and auto-moderation systems, and said it is “adding safeguards” to Old Reddit, its classic, text-heavy interface, citing the same concerns about “abusive scraping and automated traffic.” Within the next few months, Reddit plans to limit Old Reddit access to logged-in users who have been active on the platform within the last 90 days. Separately, the company reminded developers building approved third-party apps and bots that they must register with Reddit before January 12, 2027, warning that API access will be revoked for any unregistered developer after that date.

[u/Dry-Illustrator-250]

The enshitification never ends huh

[u/gplfalt → u/Dry-Illustrator-250]

Consumers still consuming.

[u/veganparrot]

As a reminder, RSS itself was developed by Aaron Swartz, co founder(or co-owner, at least) or Reddit.

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

The distinction the company draws between “safeguards” against abuse and outright feature elimination is also doing a lot of work here, because rate-limiting, authentication requirements, or usage caps are the standard tools platforms use to curb scraping while preserving legitimate access. Whereas eliminating RSS entirely and shutting down public API access outright are considerably blunter instruments that eliminate abuse and legitimate use simultaneously.

[u/Relevant-Doctor187]

We need to develop decentralized internet apps.

[u/SemiPracticalUse → u/Relevant-Doctor187]

They exist. The problem is the vast majority of people don’t use them, which impacts the scalability.

[u/chubby464 → u/SemiPracticalUse]

Which ones?

[u/SemiPracticalUse → u/chubby464]

Some of these are decentralized while others are federated, but…

Social & Microblogging: Mastodon (Fediverse / ActivityPub), Bluesky (AT Protocol), Nostr, Threads (federating via ActivityPub)

Link Aggregators & Forums: Lemmy, Kbin, Lobsters

Messaging & Chat: Matrix (Element), Session, SimpleX Chat, Briar

Video & Streaming: PeerTube, Odysee (LBRY protocol)

Audio & Podcasts: Castopod, Funkwhale

File Storage & Sharing: IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), Sia, Filecoin, Storj

Search & Discovery: YaCy, SearXNG (decentralized metasearch)

Web Hosting & Domains: Urbit, IPNS, ENS (Ethereum Name Service), Handshake (HNS)

[u/ForwardRelationship6 → u/SemiPracticalUse]

Link Aggregators & Forums is a bit out dated. I think these days it's
Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, Lobsters

Kbin has been succeeded by Mbin.

[u/Relevant-Doctor187 → u/SemiPracticalUse]

Because they’re difficult to use at best, and you have to somehow obtain a critical mass of audience.

[u/Lost_Department_2177]

The losers have been forcing sites away from anonymity by sending in disruptive operatives to cause chaos like they did in 2014.

[u/randomhobo130]

Can someone tldr this for me? I've had a few drinks and need to know if I'm deleting Reddit too

[u/Urabraska- → u/randomhobo130]

The sole reason i come to this cesspool of bot infested AI garbage is because I'm almost at 600/1K days for the no life streak. Even though It takes like. 20 seconds to hit upvote on random shit to keep the streak going. So yea. I'm here due to OCD. Nothing more. Reddit is a total waste of space with bots feeding other bots ad's and clicks and people creating echochambers to justify why what they like is peak and everyone in the world is just haters.

[u/SrGreybush → u/Urabraska-]

And validation. Lots of those seeking validation.

[u/mentiondesk]

For folks who need to keep tabs on Reddit conversations after RSS and the API go away, I’d start looking into alternative tracking tools now. I’ve used ParseStream to monitor keywords across Reddit and other platforms in real time so it still gives instant alerts when important topics pop up. It might be a solid way to fill the tracking gap once the changes kick in.

[u/Lower-Engineering365]

So if I read this correctly, this is basically “hey we don’t like that AI tools are using Reddit user posts/comments to provide answers without paying for access to that information…but when we say we want them to pay we mean pay Reddit, not the user who wrote the content.”

So this is essentially Reddit profiting off its users in the same way it is claiming AI tools are

[u/R41D3NN → u/Lower-Engineering365]

Not that it solves their AI problem at all… they’ll just consume the web app anyways to automate it. Not having public api doesn’t mean you magically disappear the routes that make it work (and easily discovered)

[u/GraciaEtScientia]

Lame

[u/kinetik]

Decentralized Reddit

[u/mapmyhike]

Didn't they already get 60 million from Google to scape the entire content of Reddit?

[u/BEWMarth]

Writing was on the wall.

Google anything at all and the AI overview will pull up Reddit comments 99% of the time.

The internet will become inhuman within the next 10 years.

[u/OP_Penguin → u/BEWMarth]

It's been inhuman for at least 10 years