Reddit is closing two of the oldest doors into its content, and blaming AI bots.
What is changing
The company said RSS feeds will stop working on 13 November 2026, and public Data API access will end by March 2027. Developers building approved third-party apps and bots must register them by 12 January 2027 or lose access. Old Reddit — the stripped-down, text-heavy version favoured by power users — will be limited to logged-in moderators and to users who have visited it in the last six months.
Reddit's stated reason: RSS has become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." The company called RSS "a beloved part of the open web" and thanked everyone who used it.
The fallout
- **Moderators lose an alerting channel.** Reddit recommends migrating to its Discord Relay Devvit app before 13 November, but concedes there is no replacement for RSS feeds used outside a moderator's own community. - **Tools that read Reddit programmatically break.** Social-listening products, academic research pipelines and AI assistants that answer questions from Reddit threads all depend on the public API; after March 2027 they will need commercial data deals.
The business logic
Reddit's "other revenue" — largely data licensing — grew 24% year over year to $43 million in its second quarter, making its archive of human conversation a product rather than a public good. Killing free feeds is a way to stop giving that product away.
RSS is the web's plainest plumbing, and it has been disappearing for over a decade: Google shut Reader in 2013 and ceded the market to services like Feedly. Reddit's decision is the latest proof that the open web's interfaces survive only as long as they can be monetised. Anyone whose tooling reads Reddit should audit what depends on those feeds now.
