Reddit to Shut Down RSS Feeds and End Public API Access in a Crackdown on AI Scraping

October 1 (IT Home) — On Wednesday local time, Reddit announced a number of updates for moderators and developers. At the same time, there was bad news for supporters who want the internet to stay more open: Reddit is about to stop supporting RSS feeds.

Reddit says RSS has now become “a common entry point for large-scale data scraping and automated abuse,” and that this is precisely why the platform has decided to phase out RSS feed functionality.

In its announcement, the platform wrote: “We know RSS has long been a much-loved part of the open internet, and we thank all the users who have kept up with Reddit content through RSS.” The announcement also stated that the platform’s public application programming interface (API) will officially shut down in March 2027.

Reddit says it will stop supporting RSS from 13 November.

As IT Home understands it, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and is a kind of web feed. Using this standardised format, users and applications can obtain updated content from websites. The format was especially popular in the era when blogs flourished, when users could subscribe to a site’s new posts through a news reader app. Google once ran the most widely used RSS reader, but shut it down in 2013, after which the market was taken over by companies such as Feedly and by other independent apps.

Reddit’s decision to shut down RSS feeds comes as the forum platform’s enormous volume of user-generated content is turning into a side business that generates revenue for the company through artificial intelligence data licensing deals.

Reddit disclosed that in the second quarter, “other revenue” excluding advertising rose 24% year on year to US$43 million (about 289 million yuan at current exchange rates). It is therefore not hard to understand why Reddit does not want this data to remain freely available.

For moderators who previously relied on RSS feeds for notifications, Reddit now suggests switching to a Discord relay app on the Devvit platform. Officials advise moderators and their teams to review their existing setups and complete the migration of their workflows before the shutdown takes effect on 13 November, so as to avoid disruption. Reddit also notes, however, that for external subscription uses outside moderator communities, there is currently no alternative to RSS feeds.

Many moderators have already expressed concern that the change will disrupt their workflows. Reddit had previously signalled that it planned to remove the RSS feature, and at that time many moderators complained that without RSS, their work managing forums would become difficult. At the same time, a large number of ordinary users stressed that RSS is an important way for them to browse Reddit content.

The RSS change is only one of several updates the company announced on Wednesday. Another major change is that the public API is also about to close.

Public API access will expire in March 2027. All tools that rely on this interface to read Reddit discussions automatically will be affected, including public-opinion monitoring products, tools used by researchers, and AI products such as AI assistants. At present, these AI assistants can directly call Reddit content to answer questions; after the public API closes, products that want to obtain platform data will have to sign commercial cooperation agreements with Reddit.

In addition, Reddit updated the progress of its Rules Hub and changes related to auto-moderation, and said it is adding protection mechanisms to the classic text-only version of the site, Old Reddit. The protections include restricting access to logged-in moderators and recently active users. Reddit likewise says this series of adjustments is a response to “malicious scraping and automated traffic.”

Reddit says that within the next few months, login access to Old Reddit will be restricted to users who have used the old version of the site at some point in the past six months.

The platform also reminded developers: if you are building a licensed third-party app or bot, be sure to complete registration before 12 January 2027 to prevent your service from being interrupted. After that date, any developer who has not completed registration will have their API access revoked by Reddit.