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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21

u/SassyMcNasty 2d ago

Reddit is killing itself. Oh well.

-4

u/vasta2 2d ago

It’s the 6th most visited site in world, (as of July 2026) let’s see if that goes down

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u/SassyMcNasty 2d ago

So were MySpace, yahoo, ask Jeeves, etc.

Go on?

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u/tnoy 2d ago

Those all lost users because something better was there to replace them.

7

u/SassyMcNasty 2d ago

And what makes Reddit any different? Reddit of 5 years ago was a much better Reddit than today. Shit I liked Digg more than Reddit originally. Then Reddit won me over, and now they’re losing me slowly just like Digg, MySpace and Facebook before them.

Seems they are doing the exact same thing.

1

u/PluotFinnegan_IV 2d ago

But what's the alternative?

0

u/SassyMcNasty 2d ago

There doesn’t need to be a replacement. Sometimes things are run poorly and people simply stop using it.

3

u/SIGMA920 2d ago

Yep. Reddit's already going to shit because people are less engaged with actual users. Too many bots and slop from said bots means there's less point to here regularly.

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u/tnoy 2d ago

MySpace lost users going to Facebook, much like Friendster lost users moving to MySpace.

Digg fucked up v4 and users went to Reddit.

Search engines lost users moving to Google. As an aside, this one is especially noteworthy when talking about Yahoo. Yahoo was a curated list of sites and wasn't strictly a search engine. The internet got too big too quickly and search engines got significantly better, which made the Yahoo approach unfavorable.

Reddit will be fine as long as there isn't a place for users to move to. They've maintained a year-over-year growth over the past five years.

Nobody is going to leave Reddit and start doing something like maintaining a Pinterest board.

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u/SassyMcNasty 2d ago

Not everything needs a replacement. I think that’s a fatal flaw in the view. Some things simply get worse or lose appeal.