Reddit will end RSS feeds on 13 November and close its public API in March 2027, saying both have become routes for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.
Developers who want to keep access will need to register by 12 January, TechCrunch reported. Reddit also said on Wednesday that Old Reddit, the stripped-back legacy site, will be open only to logged-in users active in the past six months, softened from an initial 90 days.
The company acknowledged that RSS has long been a beloved part of the open web, and said the abuse justified ending it anyway.
The cost falls widely. Moderators who rely on RSS alerts, people who read Reddit through feed readers, social listening products, research tools and AI assistants that pull Reddit threads to answer questions all lose a way in. Reddit is pointing moderators to a Discord relay app built on its own developer platform.
The scraping explanation is plausible. It also lines up neatly with the business. Reddit’s other revenue, mostly from AI data licensing, rose 24 percent year on year to $43 million in the second quarter. Once the public API closes, an AI product that wants Reddit conversations at scale will in practice need a commercial deal.
What Reddit has not published is any measure of the abuse itself, such as how much traffic came through RSS or how much of it was scrapers. Without that, it is hard to tell a security decision from a pricing one.
