Reddit will switch off RSS feeds on November 13 and shut its public API by March 2027, TechCrunch reported, the latest step in a campaign to wall off its forums from free scraping and steer both users and AI companies toward paid arrangements. The company said RSS has become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," and that the decision to retire it follows years of tightening access to the platform's raw data.
The move matters because RSS has functioned since the blogging era as a way for readers and apps to pull updates from a site without going through its official front door, according to TechCrunch. Reddit's version let moderators track new posts and comments outside their own communities. Reddit itself acknowledged the gap this creates: "If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement." the company wrote, per TheNextWeb.
Why Is Reddit Killing RSS Now?
Reddit framed the decision as a security measure rather than a monetization play. "We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we're grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit," the company said in its announcement, which also disclosed the March 2027 shutdown date for the public API, TechCrunch reported. For moderators who leaned on RSS to catch new posts, Reddit is now pointing them toward the Discord Relay Devvit app, and it has urged teams to migrate workflows before the November 13 deadline to avoid disruption.
Not everyone is convinced the replacement covers the gap. One moderator, quoted by TheNextWeb, put it bluntly: "RSS is the only way I find out about posts in subs like this one." Reddit's own guidance conceded there's no substitute for feeds that pulled in content from outside a moderator's community, and TechCrunch noted that mods had already been bracing for this since Reddit signaled the change was coming, with many warning it would make their subreddits harder to manage.
The RSS shutdown lands alongside a business trend Reddit has been eager to highlight. In its second quarter, the company said "other revenue" beyond advertising climbed 24% year-over-year to $43 million, according to TechCrunch — the licensing income that has made Reddit's forums a paying proposition for AI firms even as free access narrows.
What Happens to Old Reddit and Its Moderators?
Reddit is also tightening the screws on Old Reddit, the text-heavy legacy interface that predates the current app by roughly two decades. The company said it was "adding safeguards" to the classic layout, including limiting access to logged-in moderators and recent users, changes it attributed to "abusive scraping and automated traffic." TechCrunch reported. Within the next few months, Reddit said, logged-in access will be restricted to those who used Old Reddit within the last 130 million... rather, within the prior period the company specified, a tightening from an earlier cutoff Engadget had reported.
Engadget's coverage laid out the shift in Reddit's own words: "In the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users)," the company wrote in an r/modnews post. New accounts will lose access to Old Reddit entirely under the policy, and existing users who haven't logged into the interface recently will be barred too, though logged-in moderators are exempt from the recency requirement. Reddit has described the classic interface's logged-out traffic as a "significant source" of scraping, and an admin identified as boat-botany said at the time of an earlier restriction that "Old Reddit's logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform." The same admin had previously warned that "we can't promise it will be around forever." regarding the interface's long-term survival.
Reddit hasn't said it will abandon Old Reddit outright. CEO Steve Huffman has said his "dream" " for Old Reddit would be to " recreate the interface's appearance, if not its underlying code, on a modern foundation so it could continue to exist. Huffman also wrote that the company is weighing multiple paths forward: "We have options: We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we'll probably do all of the above,"
