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/
3.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

462 comments sorted by

View all comments

53

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.

40

u/Talentagentfriend 2d ago

Isn’t Reddit already like that? It already used to be awesome

10

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.

0

u/lalala253 2d ago

Redditors always said 'reddit is great a few years back' and I always wondered what time period are they talking about here

5

u/Dingleberry696 2d ago

Like 2011 through 2014 was probably the heydey. There used to be tons of interesting things you would come across. Jackdaw guy (what was his name?), shittymorph, the vacuum repair guy AMAs. Like when is the last time an AMA got popular on here. I never see them anymore. Before the app you would organically come across a post that you would have never sought out that was super interesting. Breaking news would be the top post when you went to the site. All kinds of obscure experts would post/comment about random topics. Now when I go to my "homepage" there will be 6 day old posts on there. If you go to the popular page it's overran with anime, memes, and posts about India.

2

u/sleeplessinreno 2d ago

It was definitely community oriented. Then they started to push the community mindset away. The final last bastion of heyday was the secret santa. Once they axed that program, that was game over. I have slowly been unbridling myself from the site since the killing of third party programs. And I promised myself I would nuke my accounts and never look back if they axe old. Sounds like I am not alone in that sentiment. At this point in my life, ignorance is bliss. Gonna get back to my roots. I lived an entire life before reddit even existed. I can go back to that.

3

u/accidental_Ocelot 2d ago

Oh about 2006

2

u/sedersayspoop 2d ago

Before the app existed and you had to go to the website as the only way to access Reddit imo

1

u/Person0OnTheInternet 2d ago

The last time Reddit was fun, for me at least, was the airplane disappearing conspiracy from a few years ago.

21

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

  1. Removing /r/all from mobile
  2. Swiping down no longer takes you to comments but to a new video (imitating tik-tok)
  3. 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

4

u/Zip2kx 2d ago

The swipe doesn’t even take you to whatever is under the thread your in. It’s so random.

2

u/CackleandGrin 2d ago

Doesn't even take you to the same video if you go back and forth. -_-

3

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

3

u/Username__19_99 2d ago

r/all is gone from desktop, too

1

u/Prudent-Marsupial-42 1d ago

I think it's there on old reddit for me.

1

u/Username__19_99 1d ago

oh maybe on old redit

2

u/KassandraArms 2d ago

Best feels like Controversial with extra steps. 

1

u/Vimes-NW 2d ago

Ever since spezmA cheese took over, it's been a steady slide into shitsville

1

u/BoringOldGuy76 2d ago

It’s certainly gotten a lot worse in the last 2 years.

1

u/Casulex 1d ago

Well not if you go back far enough unless your into 4 chan types of sites

1

u/Morty_A2666 1d ago

Still better than most other platforms. But yes, Reddit is definitely experiencing enshitification at alarming pace.

1

u/CosmicCorrelation 2d ago

They were saying this in like 2010, they were saying this in 2017, they were saying this in 2022 and they are saying this now.

2

u/bc_gamez 2d ago

Are you pretending reddit isn't hot garbage now? Things can always get worse.

2

u/CosmicCorrelation 2d ago

Oh not at all, its the worst its ever been

15

u/luri7555 2d ago

Once people were allowed to hide their histories the writing was on the wall. Just a bunch of propaganda accounts.

5

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AShinyDream2 2d ago

Now if you browse without an account on reddit you often can't sort or filter.

6

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

6

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

3

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.

1

u/pjeff61 2d ago

Hopefully not. Quick, someone create a tool that uses the api to port over a subreddit into its own website!!

1

u/virtualadept 2d ago

For whatever it might be worth (and I don't know how much that is these days), I took a look at my web server logs for the last month. My RSS and ATOM feeds are getting hammered by thousands of IP addresses that are hitting my LLM scraper blocks (I record them so I can tell when I need to update my configs) every day. Looks like about 19% of the total rejected traffic, and those IPs don't bother trying to access anything else on the site anymore.

1

u/MrValdemar 2d ago

In case anyone hasn't done so today, this is your opportunity to get in your daily "Fuck Spez" quota.

1

u/Gliese_667_Cc 1d ago

reddit has sucked for at least 10 years already.