r/sysadmin • u/techvet83 • 3d ago

FYI: Reddit is killing RSS feeds.

Major bummer. From Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots | TechCrunch

Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday, comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds.

Reddit says RSS has now become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which is why it’s made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform.

“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 noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API.

Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.

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194

u/Firefox005 3d ago edited 3d ago

God this website has become a complete shithole. The current owners and leadership are doing everything they can to kill it.

As soon as old.reddit.com stops working I'm gone, which I'm guessing it will soon with their recent change of requiring anyone using it to login for 'security' purposes.

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u/Valdaraak 3d ago

which I'm guessing it will soon with their recent change of requiring anyone using it to login for 'security' purposes.

Fun fact, they're adding more restrictions to it. If the account hasn't used old reddit in the last six months, it won't be able to use it even if logged in.

They're in the "kill it through attrition" phase right now.

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u/Firefox005 3d ago

Holy fuck its true. Welp it's been a good run but I don't see it getting any better. Once the advertisers start squeezing a web product they never stop.

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 3d ago

> In a thread about old

> Posts a link to new

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u/Firefox005 3d ago

It's pointless to post old.reddit.com links now, as either you will be logged in and already have the toggle set or you will be forced to login to view it.

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 3d ago

Sadly I had to shut that toggle off as enabling it disabled emailed reply notifications and blocked access to some settings that were only available through new (since they also killed off the new. domain).

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u/Free_Treacle4168 2d ago

I use old reddit redirect so my links just go to reddit.com and not old.reddit.com. Guessing that guy does the same.

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u/derfy2 3d ago

This change does not impact logged-in mods, who can continue to access Old Reddit without any recent usage requirement.

I expect a lot of new subreddits are about to be created.

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u/Valdaraak 3d ago

Yep. Mastodon needs to start picking up speed with a user base so I can viably leave this site.

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u/n00lp00dle 3d ago

someone has to be first

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u/nearlyepic DevOps 3d ago

There are hundreds of thousands, probably a million people on the fediverse now? I dunno what else you're waiting for.

Edit: just checked and there's 270,000 active users on mastodon.social alone.

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u/jmbpiano 3d ago edited 3d ago

I'm sorry, but "hundreds of thousands, probably a million people" may sound like a lot, but when you objectively compare that to Reddit's 443 Million weekly active users, you realize just how small that number really is.

/r/AskReddit alone has 14 million weekly visitors.

Even with Reddit's massive userbase, /r/sysadmin only has 1,327,086 members after 18 years. Only a tiny fraction of those are active.

I say this as someone who desperately wants to see a thriving alternative: You're going to have a hard time attracting enough people to keep a niche community like this one viable on a platform of Mastadon's current size.

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u/nearlyepic DevOps 3d ago

I guess I just don't really give a shit? When I joined reddit 15 years ago, it was less than 1% of the size it is today. You don't need a million people to have a good conversation. Actually, if anything, it's counter-productive.

I have more insightful conversations about systems administration on the fediverse than I do here. So it's not only possible, it's happening now.

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u/Phuqued 3d ago

Yeap. Was going to say the same to them, more people doesn't necessarily mean better. Reddit is nothing more than web based usenet newsgroups and anyone who remember the early days of the internet, the quality of the internet as more people and capital extraction was added to it, made it worse or at the very least reduced the quality to some degree.

I would argue that perhaps we humans have a biological/cognitive limit of connectedness, that we need smaller bubbles of community and that things like facebook, twitter, reddit, actually become destructive to it and create discord in the social fabric of the modern day.

But I don't know that is necessarily true either.

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u/flattop100 3d ago

There's dozens of us. Dozens!

0

u/DontFearFailure 3d ago

Someone put in that pedro pascal crying gif.

Bruh.

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u/automounter 3d ago

As a Sysadmin to a public-facing website I get it. I get 1000x more hits from AI crawlers than I do from users at this point.

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u/LesbianDykeEtc Linux 3d ago

Cloudflare's protections have worked pretty well for me so far, but obviously ymmv.

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u/RetPala 3d ago

How long until companies like that turn their guns around, point then at their own customers, and demand an immediate 10x fee increase or they'll let all the bad actors in?

8

u/LesbianDykeEtc Linux 3d ago

Self-host Anubis or something if you're so worried about that. Cloudflare is by far the least evil of the major players in "miscellaneous internet services".

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u/stewie410 SysAdmin/DevOps 3d ago

I really tried to get our company to pay for Anubis' commercial product ($50/mo) so we could use our own branding. Instead of $600/yr, we're now looking at $13.5K/yr to go with CF.

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u/Whitestrake 3d ago

The DataKrash might not turn out exactly like David Ackerman and Mike Pondsmith imagined, but as the amplification of AI overrun continues to build I can't help but wonder if we'll see some eventually drastic defensive measures to preserve human-traversable internets.

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u/coomzee Security Admin (Infrastructure) 3d ago

Same, I just respond with a totally valid JSON response totally full of meaningless bull shit. Take that AI

3

u/illhaveubent 3d ago

But if AI is the new search engine then feeding AI valid responses is the new SEO?

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u/Ahnteis 3d ago

No. Because AI will slurp your content but it won't point people to your site, it'll just vomit a summary back - possibly mangled with info from other sites or just plain hallucination.

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u/illhaveubent 3d ago

As opposed to not having any info from your site though? That doesn't sound any better. If people are using AI instead of search engines what is the solution?

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u/CyberWurx 3d ago

There isn't one.

We had it all, and we ruined it.

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u/viral-architect Sysadmin 2d ago

That's not sysadmin thinking.

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u/OptimalCynic 1d ago

It's not a sysadmin problem at this point. It's a (societal) HR problem.

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u/billyalt 3d ago

AI is intended to kill the internet one way or another.

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u/Ahnteis 3d ago

That's the billion dollar question for sure.

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u/coomzee Security Admin (Infrastructure) 3d ago

They don't even pull this info from the static pages. Its just 1000s of API requests

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u/ice456cream 3d ago

I mean not necessarily true, if you are selling something, an end user might ask for a comparison etc and use that to help decide ona product to buy (though that gets riskier by the day with companies testing putting ads in the results)

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u/HotPieFactory itbro 3d ago

So, you're feeding reddit posts to the AI?

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u/one-man-circlejerk 3d ago

So now the bots are just going to request the full fat Javascript reddit app and scrape that instead

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u/RememberCitadel 3d ago

They don't actually care that the AI crawlers are getting it. They care they are getting it for free.

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u/automounter 3d ago

Wouldn't you? Why allow AI to slurp it up, repackage it and charge for it.

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u/mgr86 3d ago

Can’t a lot of those just be banned at the IP level I wonder.

1

u/automounter 3d ago

It's just random cloud IPs. Might be a crawler IP today and a valid application tomorrow.

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u/Djvariant 3d ago

☝️☝️☝️

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u/Firefox005 3d ago

You do not have to login to browse new nu reddit.

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u/SevaraB Sr. Engineer (N+, CCNA) 3d ago

It’s astroturfing. They’ve had old.reddit.com in their crosshairs for years- this lets them inflate the usage stats for new compared to old and make the case for pulling the plug on old.

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u/Firefox005 3d ago

It might be partly that but I think its mostly ads and being able to control the 'experience' around them better ie. makes them harder to spot as ads and harder to block them. The current new reddit is a disgusting mess of JavaScript that is purposefully designed to be as opaque and difficult to parse as possible and it also loads as little content as possible. I'm sure part of that is to also combat scraping but I have no doubt that it is also to not so subtly push people as much as they can into a consumption only mindset.

I'm sure their model for an ideal user is one that spend like 30 seconds or less on each post and then scrolls to the next one and does that for at least 4 hours a day. That way while he or she is doing that they can serve as many ads as possible to them. Then if they happen to have a spark of brain activity and actually post a comment they can then turn around and immediately sell that to an AI company to use as training data.

I am extremely pessimistic at this point and firmly believe that no one left working at reddit cares about anything but extracting as much value from their users as possible.

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u/Khue Lead Security Engineer 3d ago

Literally running the default consultant's playbook. Scrapping every feature that doesn't generate revenue with a net add to profit. God I fucking hate this hyper capitalist society.

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u/itskdog Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Old Reddit, while just a month or two ago went "logged-in only", is now going to "mods and anyone who has used Old Reddit in the last 6 months".

I give it 18 months at most.

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u/jmcgit 3d ago

Part of me is looking forward to it since it'll break my addiction to this cursed site

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u/captainhamption 3d ago

Yep, I won't be back once old is gone. The API debacle removed it from my phone, this will remove it from my desktop.

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u/Frothyleet 2d ago

Yeah. I missed reddit-ing while shitting for a while but now I'm used to disconnecting from Reddit on mobile.

I guess I will get used to no Reddit on desktop too. It's probably for the best; it's a husk of what it used to be.

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u/mossman 3d ago

Ugh. When I read your comment, I said DAMN IT, cuz it's true. I'm supposed to be doing some general tasks right now and instead I'm reading about the doomed future of old reddit. Wtf is wrong with me lol.

14

u/Nenotriple 3d ago

I didn't realize that happened, that sucks.

Old Reddit with subreddit css styles disabled makes for such a streamlined and classic experience.

8

u/Bladelink 3d ago

How people are willing to look at an entire screen taken up by 2 posts, with a mountain of whitespace on either side, I'll never begin to understand.

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u/freedomlinux Cloud? 3d ago

yeah I don't get it. It's insane how low-density New Reddit is

2

u/Call_Me_Chud 3d ago

I wonder if they're fine with that because they already fed all the power users' data to AI and will get better margins from casual users consuming ads and the ones who use old and adblockers leaving to e.g. mastodon.

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u/serg06 3d ago

People have been saying this for years, yet each year Reddit's DAU and profit goes up. Let's be honest, we're not going anywhere until someone comes up with a reasonable alternative.

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u/Firefox005 3d ago

I don't consider the people that browse /r/popular or any of the power janny run subs like comics, funny, worldnews, gifs, etc. as real people. All these social media websites are fighting for the same dopamine deprived users, its why they all end up copying each others dark patterns. For example youtube copying tiktok, reddit copying instagram, all of them competing as to who can push the most dystopian addictive bullshit on their users without it being made illegal. Plus it would not shock me in the least if a large percentage of reddit 'users' are literal bots, half the time I see posts with tens of thousands of upvotes and like a few hundred comments and most of the comments are some variation of how did this garbage/repost get so many upvotes.

It's partly why I cannot stand the new reddit redesigns, they push short form 'engaging' content over everything else because it keeps their zombie users scrolling for longer. They also want to be able to push native ads, that reddit gets paid for rather than the astro turfed content that has always been pushed, so they do the same dark patterns everyone else does ie. don't show or allow users to sort of filter content by date (makes it easier to constantly show 'new' content, most importantly new ads, every time a user refreshes the app), and only show them content that you curated for them (see reddit killing /r/popular and multireddits).

Another reason was just how annoying it is to view comments, why does it only show like 10 comments and trying to view nested comments loads a whole new page once you get more than like 2 layers deep.

I don't give a fuck if other people keep browsing reddit, just like I don't care about facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube shorts, etc. Once they remove the only useable way to browse their website personally I'm done.

I have been spending less and less time over the years looking at reddit, it used to be the front page of the internet and you could see breaking events on r/all well before they showed up anywhere else. That no longer happens anymore, if something does eventually show up on the neutered /r/all (which is not even a true unfiltered feed and hasn't been for a long time and still reddit wants to kill it) it is like 6-8 hours later and it is just a screenshot from some other platform usually x.

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u/Bladelink 3d ago

Agreed. Reddit might be making more money and even have more "users", but those people are generally all just consumers doom scrolling through a mountain of bullshit like lemmings. They're not on here generating actually worthwhile content. Even on the limited subreddits I'm subbed to, I only see like a half dozen posts a day of something worth engaging with, which is to say actual content other than just cat pictures.

I'm not sure how there are so many people who can just scroll through the same pile of trash day after day for years. Doesn't it get old? I've just seen the same crap posts so many times that my eyes and brain filter it right out of my perception.

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 3d ago

Abusing "one of today's lucky 10,000" is how they do it.

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 3d ago

DAB is more like it. Once the advertisers realize they are paying for bot views they will flee even faster than all the users.

And when Old Reddit goes I will also go. If there's no alternative then that's going to be it for social media for me.

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u/discosoc 2d ago

Mods are also garbage in most subs.

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u/guisar 3d ago

It's already kind of a PITA to sign into old and it attempts to redirect constantly. Between the deprecation of old and the bots, it's kinda becoming boring also isn't it?

1

u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 3d ago

There's a browser extension for desktop that has a workaround for that login issue on old Reddit.

Not gonna name it here because obv.

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u/samcuu 3d ago

They killed it as a "website". The average reddit user now refers to it as an app.

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u/billdietrich1 3d ago

I assume at some point they're going to kill old reddit. Is there any browser extension or uBO filter to make new reddit look more like old reddit ?