Reddit is shutting down its support for RSS, a popular and widely-used protocol that allows users to subscribe to new posts and comments on their favorite subreddits without the need to have an account on the site.
The announcement was made on September 30, and users have until November 13 before the service is terminated. The reason, according to Reddit, is that RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.”
In a post announcing the end of the road for RSS on the site, Reddit said it knew that RSS has been “a beloved part of the open web for a long time” – and that the company was “grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit.”
The stated reason is not entirely unfounded – AI-powered crawlers are a real problem for sites that have to pay for the bandwidth and server power to serve them, and RSS is an easy way for them to get the content. But what about people who used RSS to simply read the site in a feed reader, without a Reddit account?
Google once dominated this space with its Google Reader, but shut it down, leaving the field to Feedly and other, smaller independent apps.
While the announcement is trying to make it seem like Reddit is a victim of some sort here, it’s really not. The company is simply choosing to stop supporting an open standard which allows users to use the client of their choice to consume content from their favorite sites.
The site’s public API will shut down in March 2027, while “unregistered” apps and users will start losing access to it as early as January 12, 2027.
The “old” Reddit – the version of the site that still uses the old design – is also being “gated” – as in, it will only be accessible to logged-in users who have used it in the previous six months. Moderators are exempt from this rule.
Moderators who used RSS to get alerts from their communities are being advised to use Reddit’s Devvit app instead. And those who used RSS for anything else? Well, there’s no replacement, Reddit said.
None of this is happening because the site is short of money. Reddit’s “other revenue” (i.e., not from advertising) has grown 24 percent year-on-year to $43 million.
The data that is too valuable to hand to crawlers for nothing is the same data Reddit is licensing. It is not closing the open web because the open web is dangerous. It is closing because the open web is hard to monetize.
