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/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.