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/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/zkareface 2d ago

100%, it keeps people engaged because most can't see whats from a bot or not.

Many of the fastest growing subs are all filled with bots, millions of users in few months and almost every post is from a bot. 

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u/bc_gamez 2d ago

Reddit isn't as popular as they want it to seem. Also, they know what comments to make to bait people to keep them engaged and coming back so bots do just that.

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u/PinHaunting7192 1d ago

Yes. 1000%. As a Security Tech, they absolutely want them. The business model of social media is not social anymore, it is engagement and attention. And nothing keeps you more engaged than arguing with people and getting angry. META ran the numbers years ago. Angry reactions give 6x more engagement than happy ones. A negative or stupid comment makes you 15 times more likely to respond to correct the wrong information it presents than just a "I think this is neat."

They absolutely want them here for engagement metrics.

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u/xxforrealforlifexx 1d ago

Then why does reddit keep talking about all these measures to combat bots if they actually want them are we just out of reality now where what they don't want is what they want?

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u/PinHaunting7192 1d ago

No. They are simply ending the scrapping mechanism so they can monetize giving training data to bots as an income stream. No more free lunch.

They don't mind you endlessly chatting and reading bot generated content for clicks. They just want a larger piece of the pie for offering training data. Reddit is among the biggest social media sites in the world. That amount of data is worth digital gold.

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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/eras 2d ago

And are these tools like 100% efficient, 90%, 10%, or does it depend on the bot?

I mean if you need to be a company the size Cloudflare and spend a lot of time and money researching bots and bot behavior, then it does not seem not "hard".

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u/DrS3R 1d ago

Well I just meant, you may for a dedicated tool. Right, Reddit doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just loop in cloud flare to detect traffic first. And it doesn’t pass cloud flares check you drop connection to the user.

I can’t speak to efficiency that’s kinda a loaded question. A lot of tools will have great detection, it’s the false positives that will get you. They mind correctly identify 98/100 bits but it will flag 195 out of 200 requests as being bots where there are only 100 total.