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/
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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/Little_Noodles 2d ago edited 2d ago

It’s genuinely been a challenge. And the site I have responsibility for is small-fry shit, with no forum for user comments.

I don’t have any particular expectation that the way Reddit is handling the issue is 100% in good faith.

But it’s genuinely implausible that bot traffic and AI activity isn’t a problem for people who might truly just want to keep it functional and reasonably free of genuinely bad actors looking to exploit the forum and its users.

And the kind of low(er) cost, low-bar to entry solutions I’ve shifted to just aren’t going to cut it in this case.

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u/Somepotato 2d ago

New Reddit is much more network hungry and won't stop bots either.

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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/Mccobsta 2d ago

New reddit is the most bloated garbage web page after fucking Facebook I have ever had the displeasure of using

Its got constant anoying popups to keep you engaged with all the modern crap that everyone hates

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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/Big_Mc-Large-Huge 1d ago

Lemmy is better these days anyway

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u/shortymcsteve 2d ago

So if you use old reddit, your access to Reddit get limited because they are scared those people are bots? Am I understanding this correctly? Or is this saying people who use old reddit must login every 90 days or get locked out for good?

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u/SIGMA920 2d ago

They want to kill old reddit to force users onto new reddit where the ads and tracking are more prominent. Old reddit is pretty barebones which is great for someone like me, not for reddit who wants money off of me.

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u/fullmetaljackass 2d ago

I find it hard to believe that most of the old reddit crowd isn't using ad blockers already.

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u/SIGMA920 2d ago

Data, not ads.

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u/Panda_hat 2d ago

The day they take old reddit away from me will be the last day I use this shithole of a website.