Reddit says it is ending support for RSS feeds on November 13 because the feeds are a target for abuse by AI bots and is ending its public API access in March
Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds.
Context & Ripple Effects
Reddit’s move extends a longer retreat from open machine-readable access: its 2023 API limits helped force the shutdown of major third-party clients, including Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader. In 2025, Reddit also restricted the Internet Archive’s indexing access after identifying AI scraping through the Wayback Machine.
The stated AI-bot abuse of RSS makes the two deadlines part of the same access-control strategy: Reddit is closing low-friction paths for automated collection while changing the terms under which developers can reach its data.
First-order effects
- RSS readers, feed-based monitoring tools, and users who follow Reddit through feeds lose that access on November 13.
- Developers relying on Reddit’s public API must change or discontinue their integrations before public access ends in March.
Second-order effects
- Services that aggregate Reddit posts or run alerts from RSS and public-API endpoints will need to re-engineer their products around whatever access routes Reddit permits, raising the cost of serving those use cases.
- Reddit gains tighter control over automated access to its discussions, reducing the utility of anonymous bulk collection through two longstanding public interfaces.
Third-order effects
- The change strengthens a public-data permission boundary in which platform content may be visible on the web but no longer freely available in formats suited to automated reuse.
- Together with earlier RSS withdrawals by Twitter and YouTube, it points to a web in which AI-scraping pressure accelerates the replacement of open syndication with platform-governed access.
The trend: AI-driven data collection is pushing social platforms to treat public machine-readable interfaces as controlled infrastructure rather than open-web utilities.