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. Reddit says RSS has now become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse,” which is why it’s made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform. Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary, is a web feed that lets users and applications access updates to a website in a standardized format. The format became particularly popular in the blogging era, as it offered a way to subscribe to a site’s new posts in a news-reading app. Google once operated the most popular of these, but shut it down in 2013, ceding the market to companies like Feedly and other indie applications.
The decision to kill Reddit’s RSS feeds comes at a time when the site’s treasure trove of user-generated content in its forums has become a profitable side business for the company in the form of AI licensing deals. During its second quarter, Reddit said its “other revenue” beyond advertising had grown 24% year-over-year to $43 million. It’s no wonder that Reddit doesn’t want to give any of that data away for free.
For moderators who have relied on RSS channels for their own alerts, Reddit is now recommending a shift to the Discord Relay Devvit app. The company suggested that moderators and their teams review their setups and migrate their workflows before the shutdown date of November 13 to ensure there’s no disruption. However, Reddit said that there’s no replacement for the use of RSS feeds that were being used for feeds outside of the moderators’ community.
Moderators have already expressed worry about how this shift would impact their workflow. When Reddit hinted earlier that it was preparing for the end of RSS on its site, many responded by complaining that Reddit would become unmanageable for them. Meanwhile, many users stressed that RSS was how they enjoyed accessing Reddit’s content.
The RSS change was one of several updates issued on Wednesday by the company. Another big change will be the end of its public API. Public API access will also end by March 2027, which will impact any tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, those used by researchers, and AI products, such as AI assistants.
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