Reddit said on Wednesday it will end support for RSS feeds on Nov. 13 and shut down its public API by March 2027, citing scraping and automated abuse.
The company said RSS had become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” while public API access will also be withdrawn for tools that use programmatic access to Reddit conversations.
“We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” Reddit said in its announcement.
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a standardized web-feed format that lets users and applications receive website updates. The format gained popularity during the blogging era because it allowed users to subscribe to new posts through news-reading apps.
Google once operated the most widely used RSS reader, but shut it down in 2013, leaving services such as Feedly and independent applications to serve the market.
Reddit said moderators who rely on RSS for alerts should move to the Discord Relay Devvit app. The company urged moderators and their teams to review their setups and migrate workflows before Nov. 13 to avoid disruption.
Reddit said it has no replacement for RSS feeds used outside moderators’ own communities. Moderators have raised concerns that losing RSS will damage their workflows, and many users have said RSS was their preferred way to access Reddit content.
The public API shutdown will affect social-listening products, research tools and AI products, including AI assistants, that use Reddit data programmatically. Reddit said developers of approved third-party apps and bots must register with the company before Jan. 12, 2027, or lose API access after that date.
Reddit also said it is updating its Rules Hub and AutoModerator tools and adding safeguards to Old Reddit, its classic text-heavy site version. Access to Old Reddit will be limited to logged-in moderators and recent users because of what Reddit called “abusive scraping and automated traffic.”
In the next few months, Reddit said it will further limit Old Reddit access for logged-in users to people who have used the site within the previous 90 days. During the company’s second quarter, Reddit said “other revenue” beyond advertising rose 24% year over year to $43 million.
Tags: Reddit
