Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds as part of a series of platform changes aimed at limiting large-scale scraping and automated abuse.
The company announced the change alongside several updates for moderators and developers. Reddit said RSS has increasingly become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” prompting it to begin winding down support for the technology.
Reddit will shut down its RSS feeds on November 13. The company acknowledged that RSS has been an important part of the open web for years and thanked users who relied on feeds to follow Reddit content.
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, allows websites to publish updates in a standardized format that can be read by news aggregators and other applications. The technology became especially popular during the blogging era because users could subscribe to websites and receive new posts through dedicated feed readers.
Google once operated one of the most widely used RSS readers, Google Reader, before shutting it down in 2013. Since then, services such as Feedly and independent applications have continued supporting RSS.
Reddit’s decision comes as the company increasingly treats its large collection of user-generated content as a valuable commercial asset. Reddit has entered into licensing arrangements that allow AI companies to access its data, making unrestricted access to the platform’s content less attractive to the company.
During its second quarter, Reddit reported that its “other revenue,” which includes revenue outside advertising, increased 24 percent year over year to $43 million.
The RSS shutdown will also affect moderators who use feeds to monitor communities and trigger alerts. Reddit is recommending that moderators move some of their existing workflows to its Discord Relay Devvit app before the November 13 deadline.
However, Reddit acknowledged that there is currently no replacement for RSS feeds that are used to monitor content outside a moderator’s own community.
Some Reddit moderators have already raised concerns about the change. The company had previously indicated that it was preparing to end RSS support, prompting users and moderators to question how they would continue managing communities and following content through external tools.
The RSS change is part of a broader set of changes Reddit announced for its platform. One of the biggest is the planned shutdown of public API access in March 2027.
Ending public API access will affect tools that rely on programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening services, research tools and some AI products. AI assistants that currently use Reddit data to answer questions could instead require commercial agreements with Reddit to access the platform’s data.
Reddit is also making changes to its classic text-based interface, known as Old Reddit. The company said it is adding safeguards because of what it describes as abusive scraping and automated traffic.
Over the coming months, Reddit plans to restrict Old Reddit access to logged-in users who have used the interface within the previous six months. The company originally planned to use a shorter 90-day period but extended it to six months when announcing the changes.
Developers building approved third-party applications and bots have also been asked to register their projects with Reddit before January 12, 2027. After that date, Reddit says API access will be removed for developers who have not registered.
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Together, the changes mark a significant shift in how Reddit handles access to its platform, with the company moving away from some of the open access tools that have historically allowed users, moderators, researchers and developers to interact with Reddit content outside the main website and apps.
