Reddit is tightening the screws on the last open doors into its platform. In an announcement this week, the company said that in the coming months the classic “Old Reddit” interface — the bare-bones, text-first version of the site that many long-time users and moderators still prefer — will be available only to accounts that are logged in and have used Old Reddit within the six months before the change takes effect. Reddit says that window covers “the vast majority of all Old Reddit users.”
The move follows an earlier step that required anyone touching Old Reddit to log in. Reddit said that change “helped reduce scraping and automated abuse,” but “still allowed any logged-in account to access Old Reddit, including accounts with no prior Old Reddit use.” Logged-in moderators will keep access without a recent-usage requirement.
RSS is next. Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, calling the format “now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” For anyone who used RSS to follow a subreddit, the company’s advice is blunt: “If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement.” It points moderators toward alternatives such as Discord Relay.
Reddit has been at war with unsanctioned access to its data for years. It blocked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, sued Anthropic over alleged unauthorized bot access, and struck licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. Apps and bots that use the public data API are being pushed onto a new Developer Platform: unregistered users lose API access on January 12, and all remaining public API access “will end in March 2027.”
The tension is personal for the company’s leadership. In May 2025 CEO Steve Huffman said Reddit would “keep it online as long as people are using it”; by August he said Reddit “need[ed] to make some changes” because Old Reddit was being used by “everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad.” Old Reddit — once a refuge from heavyweight tracking and a favourite target for third-party clients — is now the latest casualty of the platform’s anti-bot economics.
