Reddit Kills RSS Feeds and Walls Off Old Reddit as AI Scrapers Force Open Access Shut

Reddit is closing the last open doors to its content. On Wednesday, September 30, the company said it will end RSS feed support on November 13, restrict Old Reddit to a shrinking group of loyal users, and shut down public API access for apps over the next six months. The reason it gave for all three is the same: bots scraping the site at industrial scale.

For a platform built on free, public conversation, it is a sharp turn. RSS feeds and the bare-bones Old Reddit interface were some of the simplest ways to read Reddit without its app, its algorithmic feed or its ads. They were also, according to Reddit, among the easiest ways to vacuum it up.

RSS goes first

Reddit says RSS has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. Feeds are lightweight, require no login and are trivial to poll, which makes them as useful to a data harvester as to a person using a feed reader.

There is no replacement for the people who relied on them. Reddit is pointing moderators to a Discord Relay app built on its Devvit developer platform, but that only covers mod workflows for communities they run. Anyone who followed a subreddit, a user or a search through a feed reader loses that option in six weeks.

Old Reddit becomes a members' club

The changes to Old Reddit are subtler but will sting more for a vocal part of the user base. Over the next few months, old.reddit.com will only be available to logged-in accounts that used Old Reddit within the previous six months. Moderators who are logged in are exempt from that recent-use rule.

Reddit had already forced logins for Old Reddit. That cut abuse, the company says, but any logged-in account could still get in, including dormant accounts spun up for bots. The six-month window is meant to close that gap by rewarding real habits rather than account creation. Old Reddit is not being deleted, but anyone who drifted away from it is about to find the door locked.

The move undercuts a promise. CEO Steve Huffman said in May 2025 that Old Reddit would stay online as long as people used it. By August, he was saying spam and scraping abuse had forced the company's hand.

The API closes too

Developers get a firmer deadline. Public API access for apps that have not registered with Reddit ends starting January 12, 2027, and the remaining public API access ends in March 2027. After that, getting Reddit data programmatically means going through Reddit on Reddit's terms.

Anyone who lived through the 2023 API pricing fight that killed Apollo and other third-party apps will recognize the pattern. This time the stated target is not app developers but AI crawlers, though the collateral damage looks similar.

Why Reddit's data got so valuable

The context is money. Reddit's archive of human conversation is some of the most sought-after training material for large language models, and the company has spent two years turning it into a product. It struck licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. It blocked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine over concerns that AI companies were using it as a backdoor. It sued Anthropic over alleged unauthorized bot access to the site.

Those licensing deals are starting to show up in the numbers. Reddit's "other revenue," the line outside advertising where data licensing sits, grew 24% year over year to $43 million in the second quarter. When someone is paying for the data, every free feed and unauthenticated endpoint looks like a leak in the pipe. Licensed partners keep their access; it is the free routes that are closing.

Reddit is far from alone in treating scraping as theft rather than a cost of being on the open web. The argument that AI companies are taking labor without paying for it has moved from creators into boardrooms, and regulators are now looking hard at how OpenAI and Anthropic operate.

Who pays the price

The people losing the most here are not the scrapers with budgets for proxies and fresh accounts. They are researchers, hobbyist developers, accessibility tool makers and long-time users who preferred a simpler interface. RSS and Old Reddit were the quiet infrastructure that let Reddit feel like part of the open web.

Reddit is betting that the trade is worth it: fewer bots, more control and a cleaner story for the companies writing it checks. For the users who helped build the archive everyone now wants to buy, the open version of Reddit is getting smaller by the month.