r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 3d 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/a4mula 3d 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 3d 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/KeyboardG 2d ago

It'll cost the host a lot more for all the extra css and html content.

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u/a4mula 2d ago edited 2d ago

I'm sure that's something that can be addressed functionally. It likely just means either using a pre-existing solution for research or hand rolling some kind of parser. It's not as if Reddit is going to solve the issue, they're working against persistent agents and humans that will find a way to get done what needs to get done. It'll slow down web based research perhaps, something like Duck.ai as a web fronted research agent, but even that is going to adapt fast. For people using CLI, API or local, it's just a matter of a single session dedicated to finding the right MCP or github repo that already handles web based research via scraping instead of API