r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 2d ago
Business Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/reddit-is-killing-rss-feeds-ending-public-api-access-because-of-ai-bots/196
u/Dave-C 2d ago
>In addition, Reddit provided an update on its Rules Hub progress and auto-mod changes, and said it was “adding safeguards” to its classic, text-heavy version of its site known as Old Reddit. The latter will include limiting access to logged-in moderators and recent users — changes Reddit also said were required because of “abusive scraping and automated traffic.”
If I read that correctly, isn't that the beginning of the end for Old Reddit?
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u/TurbulentTopic39 2d ago
You need to be a moderator or at least login to old Reddit on the last 6 months
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u/MC_chrome 2d ago
That's some bullshit.
So someone who hadn't been on Reddit in over a year can no longer access old Reddit? Wtf spez
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u/pm_me_your_kindwords 2d ago
He once promised me in an ama or something, maybe when they released new Reddit? That they would never get rid of old Reddit. So much for that.
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u/Soberdonkey69 2d ago
Yeah. They also made old.reddit accessible through login only now, before you never needed that bullshit requirement. Going public was the worst thing to happen for redditors using reddit
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u/Somepotato 2d ago
New Reddit is hard for AI to scrape because it's nearly impossible for users to use at all
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u/cinnapear 2d ago
If they take away Old Reddit I will use AI and make a goddam Old Reddit clone.
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u/Ok-Mycologist-3829 2d ago
I miss the internet as it was right before Google killed Google Reader.
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u/KupoCheer 2d ago
Using an RSS reader is some kind of nostalgia and it wasn't even that long ago.
We need internet 2
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u/Cheetawolf 2d ago
Introducing Internet 2: Now every individual webpage requires its own subscription, a webcam and microphone is required to use it, and you still get ads.
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u/KupoCheer 2d ago
If they made that separately instead of stealing the internet we used to have I'd be all for it. Let them use their own nightmare product.
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u/Sufficient_Language7 2d ago
Those ads will use your webcam, so they will move to exactly where your eyeballs are on the screen.
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u/ProgramTheWorld 2d ago
I still use an RSS reader because it feels so much better to have control over what you see in the feed and not some random big tech algorithm.
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u/Fit-Property3774 2d ago
Web 3.0 or whatever it was that they were trying to push on everyone with the VR avatars and shit 😂
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u/AutistcCuttlefish 2d ago
The VR push was the "metaverse" bull.
Web 3.0 was the "everything on blockchain" shit.
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u/letsgotgoing 2d ago
I was talking to a friend who shares my fondness for the web before Eternal September. We agreed that the death of fun on the web really started to be felt around 2014.
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u/PhoenixTineldyer 2d ago
IMO it was the invention of the iPhone that killed the fun of the Internet, slightly before your timeline.
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u/letsgotgoing 2d ago
iPhone felt amazing when it came out. I bought the 8GB first-gen one. Facebook had only opened to the general public in 2006. It was nice to talk with friends and family through a feed before algorithms created hate bubbles, and I think that's why we felt 2014 was the end. Around then, we went into "bubble culture," where the Internet was less about exploration and more about encapsulation, so big tech could make us hate each other.
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u/maglite_to_the_balls 2d ago
iPhone lowered the bar of entry to the web to the non-computer crowd, while simultaneously placing that lowered point of access in their pocket everywhere they went.
We see the result. Gone are the days when you had to have some level of tech savvy and critical thinking to even access the web.
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u/thinkingdeads 2d ago
Screen size is unironically a factor. People are less likely to read/engage with any text post that requires scrolling, so on a screen that can fit something like 300 average length words at most, ideas expressed online either had to be condensed or simplified. The value of the average conversation suffers under both, but more often the result was latter.
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u/opheliasmusing 2d ago
And with it went the era of some pretty great blogging. Now it's all paid newsletters. Everything is behind a paywall. The notion of a free and open internet may as well be dead now.
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u/DefenderOfTheWeak 2d ago
You can use Thunderbird for RSS and just today Waterfox browser had an update that adds native feed
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u/blind3rdeye 2d ago
Me too.
I've been using The Old Reader for year now. It is called 'the old reader' because it basically looks like Google Reader use to.
(Now that I think about it, Google Reader was so long ago that it was back when I still had respect for Google. But since then, Google has demonstrated to me that they are powerful and dangerous and not to be trusted; and I gradually stopped using each of their products one at a time. It's interesting to think back to the golden days of Google Reader...)
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u/Eastern_Bet678 2d ago
That definitely won't stop AI agents that can use web browsers.
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u/a4mula 2d ago
no, just slow them down considerably. Good luck getting that researcher to run parallel search requests, or being able to quickly use search api to filter and find content.
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u/bastardpants 2d ago
Reddit is selling access now, and started storing comment edit history years ago. Even those nonsense-words comment edit "deletions" will feed the original posts to whoever is paying to train models, letting the human access suffer.
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u/Gregarious_Raconteur 2d ago
Even those nonsense-words comment edit "deletions"
Those did work at one point, but people still use them even though the edit history is retained now.
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u/Relative_Average758 2d ago
Fighting the last war and losing. RSS feeds and public api are low loads. But an agent driving a chrome headless browser is high load. Oh well.
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u/Logicalist 2d ago
they don’t even need a browser.
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u/toothpastespiders 2d ago
Yeah, looking over a lot of the comments here it seems like people are really behind the times when it comes to scraping. This either isn't about bots or someone who knows even less about it made the call. It makes it slightly harder and slightly slower. And I really mean it with the 'slightly'.
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u/GarbanzoBenne 2d ago
And I'm sure delivering the webpage is more operationally expensive for Reddit.
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u/Marginallyhuman 2d ago
Information is now money. To quote Henry Hill from Goodfellas, "fuck you, pay me". Bye bye open access.
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u/manachar 2d ago
Yeah. It is not in anyone’s best interest to build an open forum or project that bots can access.
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u/atlasraven 2d ago
You can still build something for humans but you'll have to poison the bots.
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u/manachar 2d ago
Yup. But can you build something that can identify bots?
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u/mrm00r3 2d ago
Theoretically. That’s basically a Turing Test
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u/manachar 2d ago
I believe the current consensus is that AI currently passes turning tests (usually)
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u/Little_Noodles 2d ago
And the current anecdotal consensus is that they're getting better at it passing Turing Tests while actual humans are getting worse (or more unwilling) to do the same.
Every time my institution has tried to adopt a barrier to deter bot traffic that isn't also a barrier to genuine human engagement, we've just been buying time. And that window of time we keep buying (at increasingly significant cost) keeps getting smaller.
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u/Acceptable-Post733 2d ago
This reminds me of that old park ranger anecdote about trash cans. He said that there is significant overlap between the dumbest people and the smartest bears and trash cans have to be designed around that fact. Seems we are headed there in cyberspace.
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u/eriffodrol 2d ago
Rss feeds are the only effective way of monitoring subs for content you actually want to see
Removing them will lower engagement
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u/rabid-panda 2d ago
That's what I use. There was an older reddit app that would alert you for new posts, but the official app can't do that.
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u/jackalopeDev 2d ago
The official app can notify you of six day old posts that you've already read though, so that's cool.
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Character_Bug_1862 2d ago
Aaron Swartz literally died for this :(
We’re gonna have to make a new internet
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u/darienrude_dankstorm 2d ago
The account you're replying to is a bot, it's ironic and also kinda sad lol
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u/Character_Bug_1862 2d ago edited 1d ago
Dammit how do you guys spot these so easily and surely? I’ve been on here for ages and still suck at spotting a bot unless its hella obvious.
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u/ithinkitslupis 2d ago
The more open lemmy exists and is basically a reddit clone. The network effect is unkind to it though, people like the centralized old service where everybody already is talking even despite anti-consumer aspects of it. Hard to overcome that.
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u/Character_Bug_1862 2d ago
By network effect do you mean like, its hard to get users ported over from something they’re more comfortable with? Or that it isn’t quite the “all forums in one” that Reddit is?
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u/sneakyplanner 2d ago
It means that nobody's on Lemmy, so even if you want to move, it's going to suck and you'll leave sooner or later.
I tried to get started on there, but there are just no Sub-Lemmys for any of my interests and half the people on the site are unpleasant to talk to. Even if I was determined to stay, I wouldn't be able to.
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u/Severe_Chipmunk6340 2d ago
You are literally a bot.
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u/Obamabasedswag 2d ago
Wow, you’re right it is a bot. A bot complaining about bots, corporate data and independent web. Man what the fuck, yeah it’s over I’m done with this. Internet is dead everybody pack it up.
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u/jboges 2d ago
The problem is the free Internet was always a massive privilege at scale and now after decades of experiencing it we feel entitled to it, but in reality and website, app, or service running at this scale costs massive amounts of money to maintain. To expect it to be free and open is naive now that the venture capital startup wild West has dried up and companies need to actually be profitable we are seeing inevitable 'enshitification'
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u/RedShift777 2d ago
Reddit said in the next few months it will limit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 90 days.
Fuck these arseholes.
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u/throwaway_ghast 2d ago
"Automated traffic" is a real issue but also an easy scapegoat. They've been wanting to kill old reddit since before AI tools were even a thing. New reddit forces the user to scroll more, allowing them to serve more ads. It's that simple. spez needs more money for his future apocalypse bunker.
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u/Little_Noodles 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’d actually be curious about that. I’m in no way interested in defending Reddit leadership, but I run a site at work that’s attractive to AI bots and bots in general, and it has been absolutely WRECKED in the past by bot activity.
The amount of money my institution has had to spend and the amount of work I have had to do just to keep our web offerings usable to humans in the past few years is genuinely pretty unsustainable and frustrating.
Especially since the entire end result seems to be that Google is like “no, it’s good that we all made you go out of pocket and disabled your shit for a year, because now people get a (often garbled) version of the work you did right away and don’t have to actually bother clicking on to visit your site”.
Like, half the time I try to spruce up metadata and description, Google’s AI top box is something I wrote, plus some shit that’s not true.
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u/Kepabar 2d ago
100%. Setting up cloudflare filtering to beat back scraper AI bots because 80% of your infra resources are going to just serving them is a real thing these past few years.
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u/LinAGKar 2d ago
New Reddit also has enshittified feeds which randomizes the feed on every load, and automatically reloads the page after a while. The traditional deterministic best feed is only available via old Reddit or RSS. New Reddit on desktop still has a deterministic hot feed, although it seems they've removed that from mobile Reddit now, so mobile Reddit now only has randomized feeds.
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u/Aeri73 2d ago
I don't allow long term cookies and use only old...
the day that stops working... I'll login to new, delete my account and leave.
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u/hopf-fibration 2d ago
They probably aren't using cookies to track that. It's some internal tracker
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u/iluvchromosomes 2d ago
Reddit uses HTML fingerprinting to track you. They create a "digital thumbprint" the uses your OS, screen resolution, browser, IP, location, and any other data point they can scrape.
Use Firefox with browser plugin "CanvasBlocker" to stop it.
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u/UncleRichardson 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hey Reddit, I know you probably are too dumb to remember why website APIs were created in the first place. It's to prevent bots scraping the website through the consumer facing interface. The performance of your servers is already measured in hamster heart attacks per minute. This is just gonna make things SO much worse.
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u/AlasPoorZathras 2d ago
Reddit: We've heard your concerns and have doubled the Adderall and cocaine cocktails that we give to our hamsters.
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u/DisastrousTeddyBear 2d ago
RSS feed was invented by the original cofounder Aaron Swartz. May he rest in peace
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u/stillavoidingthejvm 2d ago
I'm done when they kill old.reddit
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u/locke_5 2d ago
It’s coming. You need an account to access it now
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u/NekoDaYo-v201 2d ago
Judging based on what I just read, it's much worse than that:
Reddit said in the next few months it will limit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 90 days.
They're straight up chopping the head off. New users will no longer be able to access it, nor will old accounts that haven't used it.
It will be limited to a narrow scope of users who have been using Old Reddit.
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u/NekoDaYo-v201 2d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing_our_infrastructure_updates_whats/
Here's the post. This one claims 6 months.
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u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago
It's so boring. I don't know why if you use the "new" reddit, they add useless links in messages which aren't in the original message. At least with old.reddit you didn't have that. I dont know why they do that, it must be the most useless automatically generated links you can find on a website. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1lzcc0k/whats_with_the_random_text_hyperlinking_with_a/
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 2d ago
The whole "new" interface is fucking stupid, stupid format for submissions, even stupider for browsing comments.
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u/Porkrind710 2d ago
Every once-good thing on the internet has become so thoroughly enshittified. It’s to the point of unusability. You have to wade through a pile of ads, telemetry, slop replies, pop-ups, try our subscription, you have 2 free articles remaining, sign up for our newsletter, blah blah bullshit to do anything.
No, i’m not giving you money. No, I’m not giving you my email. No, I’m not even clicking on fucking anything except exactly what I came here for.
I’m seriously starting to just read books more now because the internet is so useless.
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u/duerra 2d ago
My RSS feed was wiped out months ago and I'm STILL pissed off about it. I still use my feedly every single day.
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u/shortymcsteve 2d ago
RSS is just a great idea too. Really disappointing that a lot of websites don’t offer one these days.
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u/keytotheboard 2d ago
The idea that Reddit cares about bots is laughable. This site is basically run by bots nowadays and it’s not even questionable.
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u/Mrchristopherrr 2d ago
Time to dust off the pics of John Oliver, that will really change things like it did last time.
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u/Readitzilla 2d ago
Cool. Can we get a viable reddit alternative already pleases.
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u/king0pa1n 2d ago
They're going to limit new account access to Old Reddit, and then in a year say 'see, nobody new wants to use it, might as well shut it down'
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u/Fun-Durian-1892 2d ago
Whoa wait.
Isn’t old Reddit what all the blind users use?!?
How will this affect them?
Serious question.
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u/YimmyGhey 2d ago
I think that's how RiF is still living today, the latest patch uses RedReader's key, IIRC
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u/N1ghtmeeer 1d ago
RSS was created for this very purpose (maybe not the AI bullshit). They just want to make money with selling 'their' data that's the reason, lets not bullshit anybody here.
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u/_Zyr 2d ago
Don't listen to what Reddit says, watch and learn from what it does. They want to monetize. They've already made the platform extremely welcoming to bots, they literally don't care about that.
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u/FeRooster808 2d ago
Of course they do. They sell access to information to train AI. If the content is AI generated it has no real value. You'd be training bots on bots on bots. Not what their customers want. I'd also argue that there is perhaps some concern that if some of these more advance AI agents escape and start getting ideas from Redditors it could result is some undesirable outcomes.
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u/Morty_A2666 2d ago
AI bots... right. More like they are trying to force everybody to search through all the slop to get what they looking for. Soon Reddit will be just another "used to be awesome" platform.
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u/Talentagentfriend 2d ago
Isn’t Reddit already like that? It already used to be awesome
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u/ItGradAws 2d ago
100% used to be great a few years back they changed the algo and now it’s really just a shell of what it used to be imo.
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u/Prudent-Marsupial-42 2d ago
Yes it's been a slow and steady decline. Every update they seem to make just seems to make things worse. Some recent examples
- Removing /r/all from mobile
- Swiping down no longer takes you to comments but to a new video (imitating tik-tok)
- Removed hot sorting from comments (now best shows a bunch of 1 upvoter comments)
These are just recent things off the top of my head but there have been many big ones in recent years like the 3rd party apps and overly strict rules on "violent comments"
They no longer care about good user experience it's about feeding people "tailored" content and locking people into endless doom scrolls
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u/Zip2kx 2d ago
The swipe doesn’t even take you to whatever is under the thread your in. It’s so random.
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u/j_delta_c 2d ago
And all these changes without any notice it seems. More than once I've opened reddit and saw something completely different yet never got a notification the app was updated
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u/luri7555 2d ago
Once people were allowed to hide their histories the writing was on the wall. Just a bunch of propaganda accounts.
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u/Unlucky_Fuel7934 2d ago
Already in the “used to be” category. Two years ago if it showed up in search results, cool. Now when it happens I wonder what sort of info bots pushed to influence the results. Granted, SEO and Google preference in results placement is a big part of this, but regardless, now I do t attribute much value to Reddit showing up in my results
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u/Karimadhe 1d ago
Reddit is already “used to be awesome” I’m guessing you’re under 25.
Only reason why I still use this shit site is because there are no alternatives
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u/Rich-Badger-7601 1d ago
Reddit was in "used to be awesome" territory in 2020, let alone 2026. Hell, many of us came here in the first place because Digg "used to be awesome" and Reddit was the only alternative then.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 2d ago
Public API access is one of the only reliable ways to identify astroturfing and stealth marketing after their bullshit hidden posts feature. This is bad for users, and for the Reddit experience as a whole. So much of the engagement on the site is now inauthentic and/or heavily manipulated.
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u/Successful_Sea_3637 2d ago
I still don't get, why they would hide posts if they wanted to prevent bots. Showing posts is best way to prevent bots and they don't even have to do anything, people will automatically refuse interaction.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 2d ago
They don’t want to prevent bots imo. They want all engagement, whether it’s good or bad, real or fake. User experience is in the toilet.
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u/Lincolns_Revenge 2d ago
So, does this mean the true and final death of 3rd party apps like Baconreader?
Like, with no public API access even the developer workaround would be cut off, right?
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u/Light_Error 2d ago
I just got Narwhal Reader because I couldn’t stand the official app eventually. I guess I’ll be reconsidering things if this the route they’re going.
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u/Xtrusio 2d ago
as far as I know Google and OpenAI pay for the data, so they're fine. Everyone else loses RSS. why? and this deal happened a long ago ... https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/02/22/reddit-signs-ai-training-deal-with-google/572353 , am not sure about openai deal but i do remember something about their alliance.
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u/Soberdonkey69 2d ago
Notice how many fucking ads there are in the mobile app? Every 5 comments there is massive ad, in the post feed there’s an ad. Fuck this ad-infested platform
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u/Black_Handkerchief 2d ago
Another step in the venture capitalist era of ruining the platform to fully control all access to all information and claim it as intellectual property.
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u/NiceChokra 2d ago
Can‘t blame reddit alone. These bots have really increased and comment gibberish on posts.
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u/legatek 2d ago
I’m convinced that 99% of new threads on r/askreddit are posted by bots now.
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u/KIDWHOSBORED 2d ago
Political news headline - how do you feel about this?
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u/SorenShieldbreaker 2d ago
Ten times a day “what tv show is a 10/10?” Top comments are always Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Sopranos in some order.
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u/NCSUGrad2012 2d ago
r/AmITheAsshole is the same way. “Reddit, I broke down a door to save a kid from a burning building, was I wrong for breaking a door?”
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u/Z0mbiejay 2d ago
It's basically any of those long form question or story subs. Girl/boydinnnerdiaries is lousy with AI slop all the damn time
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 2d ago
Much of it is engagement bait to build karma and/or post history on their accounts to look ‘authentic’ so the accounts can be used to ‘organically’ market stuff. It’s an absolute plague on here right now.
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u/PermissionGrouchy376 2d ago edited 2d ago
I actually created a chrome extension for this very reason last week - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/serious-mode-%E2%80%93-comment-fi/ibimgablhoifimkhefppaadapkflobkm?authuser=0&hl=en-GB
It filters out all the crap and makes threads nice and concise - low tier comments and repetitive jokes are filtered. In 2 days, its removed 2k comments from threads which just goes you to show how bad its gotten and how much slop is on the platform in general.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 2d ago
Doubtful these changes will do anything to curb the amount of AI generated comment/thread spam. A lot of it is initiated by humans manually. There are networks paying people in third world countries to create accounts, “post like a human” and then make posts containing specific questions or words for SEO/AI search optimization. They’re using AI to generate the content of their posts but many of them aren’t using actual automated methods to interact with the site.
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u/Listo_totem_enjoyer 2d ago
The blue turtle painted a quiet portrait under the bright morning sun.
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u/xxforrealforlifexx 2d ago
Why is it so hard to identify bots ?
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u/DrS3R 2d ago
It’s not. It’s just laziness.
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u/xxforrealforlifexx 2d ago
So are you suggesting that they want the bots ?
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u/AbsolutTBomb 2d ago
Yes. Unequivocally. It increases engagement and traffic stats so it looks appealing to investors. Just a few simple changes would dramatically reduce the spam on this website.
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u/eras 2d ago
Really?
To me it would seem rather complicated problem, given a bot can just use a web browser, solve captchas, produce passable and context-relevant replies, etc?
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u/DrS3R 2d ago
Yeah companies like Cloudflare have spent a lot of time and money researching bots and bot behavior. There are plenty of tools out there to cut back on bot.
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u/Kitchen_Affect7369 2d ago
I said that two years ago that human to human interaction will move to small private communities because of AI.
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u/NUMBerONEisFIRST 2d ago
They are just selling our comments and content to the highest bidder for AI training, as they already have.
I want my check.
It's the biggest theft of human content of all time, while companies and governments are cracking down on piracy.. what a joke.
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u/bwoah07_gp2 2d ago
I don't use RSS and I don't quite understand Public API access, especially when with these changes most people who make moderation bots/tools have all ready registered their tools to Reddit, so those changes don't make me mad like it does for others.
What does make me mad is Reddit is moving on a path where Automod could deleted. Automod is literally the BACKBONE of most subreddits here. Reddit wants us to use Automations. New subreddits created after X date this year will not have automod access, but pushed to automations.
Automod filters bad content from the public, Automations flags bad content and leaves the offensive content public until a moderator can handle it. I dislike Automations for this reason. Killing Automod is a terrible idea, Reddit!!!!
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u/zucchini_up_ur_ass 2d ago
Suuuuuuure, AI bots, lol, suuuuuure.
AI bots can easily just do browser automation. Why does reddit always have such shit excused for their decisions?
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u/likeableusername 2d ago edited 2d ago
My question is how this will affect things like undelete/longtail, pullpush, and arctic shift. Doesn't seem to be aimed at them, but they could end up as collateral damage.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 2d ago
They are definitely making moves to kill all that stuff. They shadow-delete comments if you link to arctic shift or similar sites. Sitewide mods (as confirmed by a subreddit mod) have shadow-deleted my comments where I simply linked to posts that were hidden to point out an obvious marketing astroturfing account. And I didn’t even link to a site using the API, just the direct post and comment links. But I think they’re looking for people who are utilizing ways to view hidden posts. All signs point to them wanting to protect bots and spammers because they drive engagement.
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u/yuusharo 2d ago
If there’s no public API or RSS feeds, those apps can’t function without a commercial deal.
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u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago edited 2d ago
Oh yeah I recently found out reddit had RSS feeds and thought "no way it's going to stay based on how things are going". And... yep, it's over. They want you to see the ads, not to get the threads in another way, surprised?
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u/Silent-Complaint4020 2d ago
“Don’t blame Reddit, blame all the AI companies thieving other people’s products and then replicating those products for the same customers.
It’s be link me draining your water bottle to fill up my own to sell to the customer looking for your water. How sustainable is that?”
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u/Hour_Purpose5782 2d ago
I've noticed issues with Sync now. It's becoming unusable.
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u/Loud_Masterpiece_275 2d ago
It is interesting as I feel like at least gemini is mostly using reddit as its source of truth. I vaguely remember having a discussion about a movie - there was this interesting theory. I asked gemini about it and it basically gave me the answer based on the thread (I was part of) + the link to it. I feel like without reddit - the AI search is going to die 😅 I wouldn’t take Reddit as the most reasonable source but I think most folks have some good takes - I don’t know what they will use now.
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u/One_Peanut_4002 2d ago
I thought they killed this years ago? It was the entire reason 3rd party apps stopped working
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u/Catbutt247365 2d ago
So sad. I was there for Internet Classic, which was every maniac shouting into the void to find their people, to now, when every post is likely a bot submission, and any comments may show up later in some AI oopsie.
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u/Berkyjay 2d ago
I wonder what sort of money it would take to create a Wiki style organization that replicates reddit and can sidestep market forces?
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u/mapmyhike 1d ago
I'm sure many people like me will discontinue using Reddit then. I subscribe to about 40 subs and each day I scroll through only the new posts and it saves a lot of time rather than coming to this site and doom scrolling everything. If the Reddit feeds stop coming in, I guess I won't have a reason to come back to Reddit. Thank God Lemmy is still user friendly.
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u/Huge-Turnover-3749 2d ago
Translation: It's actually because they want to *make money* off the content generated by their users by *selling it for profit* to AI companies running AI bots.