Reddit’s run as a free firehose of human conversation is ending. The company told moderators and developers on Wednesday that RSS feeds stop working on November 13, and that public API access closes by March 2027.
Reddit blames automated abuse. In its post, the company said RSS had become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. The API change cuts similar access. Social listening products, academic researchers and the AI assistants that pull Reddit threads to answer questions will all feel it. They will need commercial data agreements to keep working.
Old Reddit is being walled off too. Reddit said it is adding safeguards to the text-heavy classic interface, restricting it to logged-in moderators and recent users, again citing automated traffic.
The money explains the motive. Non-advertising revenue jumped 24 percent year over year to $43M last quarter, largely from licensing forum data to AI firms. Cutting free feeds makes that data harder to take without paying.
Moderators who leaned on RSS for alerts are being steered to a Discord Relay app. Reddit acknowledged there is no substitute for feeds consumed outside a community, and users who had heard the change was coming had already objected.
