Reddit will retire RSS feeds and close its public API

Reddit has put dates on the end of open access to its platform. RSS feeds stop working on 13 November, and what is left of the public data API closes in March 2027, with app and bot developers told to register what they run by 12 January 2027.

The two-part timeline landed in a pair of posts on Reddit's own r/modnews and r/redditdev communities on 30 September, alongside a set of moderation changes that will land over the next few months.

RSS goes first, and there is no like-for-like replacement

Reddit describes RSS as “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse” and will stop supporting feeds on 13 November 2026. Mod teams that lean on RSS for alerts are being pointed at Devvit apps such as Discord Relay, and Reddit says it is preserving those moderation workflows through supported alternatives rather than keeping the protocol alive.

Anyone using RSS for feeds outside a community they moderate gets a firmer answer: there is no replacement. Reddit's own note thanks the people who used feeds to stay connected and then closes the door on them.

The public API closes in two stages

The developer post splits the API shutdown into two deadlines rather than one. From 12 January 2027 Reddit will begin removing API access for apps and users that have not registered or engaged with the company, and whatever public API access survives that cull ends in March 2027. Migration funding applications close on 30 November.

Reddit says more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far, and that it is tracking the migration of its highest-traffic tools, including DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot and RemindMeBot. The company is also asking communities that depend on a bot whose maintainer has vanished to name it, a route that has already surfaced more than 100 submissions.

Old Reddit and automod change too

Within the next few months the classic interface will be limited to logged-in accounts that have used Old Reddit in the last six months. Moderators are exempt. Reddit says the rule is aimed at accounts with no prior Old Reddit history, which it links to automated traffic rather than nostalgia.

Automod's enforcement tools — Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as spam and Approve — will be switched off for newly created communities and for communities that have never used automod, with Rules Hub and Automations becoming the default route for rule enforcement. Automod's non-enforcement features stay as they are, and existing configurations keep working.

Why the doors are closing now

Reddit frames all of this as the follow-through on an August plan to modernise its infrastructure and make scraping harder. The timing is not accidental. Large language models made bulk text collection cheap and valuable at the same moment, and Reddit's answer has been to move access behind the Developer Platform, where apps are registered, identified and accountable.

Our opinion

RSS is almost embarrassingly cheap to serve. A feed poll is a few kilobytes of XML and a cache hit, which makes the scraping-cost argument hard to take at face value — the expensive thing Reddit is trying to stop is not feed traffic but the AI crawlers that treat a public API like a free firehose. Killing RSS catches the small, well-behaved readers in the same net as the harvesters, and it hands moderators a migration job they did not ask for.

The more interesting move is the January deadline. Requiring every bot to register turns anonymous automation into an accountable account, which is defensible, but it also concentrates a lot of community infrastructure behind one company's approval process. Bot owners who have drifted away from their projects will not file paperwork in time, and the communities that depended on them will find out the hard way in March.

There is a business logic underneath the safety language, and Reddit has never hidden it: licensed, authenticated access is worth money, while open feeds are worth nothing. The trade Reddit is asking for — less open web, more control — is a real one, but it should be priced honestly rather than dressed up as anti-abuse housekeeping.

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.