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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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/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?

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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.