Reddit Is Ending RSS and Public API Access: What Changes
Reddit will shut off RSS feeds on November 13 and end public API access by March 2027. The company announced both dates on September 30. The RSS cutoff comes first. The API shutdown follows four months later. TechCrunch
RSS is a long-standing format that lets software check a page for new posts without logging in. Reddit described RSS as a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse". That was the stated reason for winding down RSS feeds. The company also pointed to abusive scraping and automated traffic as the reason for new limits around Old Reddit.
For moderators, Reddit recommended moving RSS-based alerts inside their own community to the Discord Relay Devvit app before November 13. Devvit is Reddit's system for running moderator tools inside Reddit itself. Reddit said there is no replacement for RSS feeds that tracked posts outside a moderator's own community. Workflows that depended on checking those outside feeds will lose their source data.
Reddit also announced safeguards for Old Reddit, the older, text-heavy version of the site still used by many long-time members. Access will be limited to logged-in moderators and recent users. In the next few months, the company said it will limit Old Reddit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 90 days. That 90-day condition applies to logged-in access specifically.
Reddit reported second-quarter 2026 other revenue beyond advertising grew 24% year-over-year to $43 million. TechCrunch
The broader context here is the mismatch between open feeds and automated collection at scale. RSS polling is simple, stateless and cheap to run across many pages. That simplicity once made it a standard building block for moderation alerts, feed readers and archiving tools. It also makes large-scale crawling cheap, since software can send out many requests without logging in, agreeing to limits or keeping session information.
Looking at what this means for builders and moderators, the impact splits into two tiers. Inside a single community, alerts can move to a Devvit app running within Reddit's own system. That path preserves alerts and ties them more closely to moderator permissions. Outside that boundary, there is no mapped path. Multi-community dashboards, cross-post trackers and outside copies that used RSS have no stated migration. The November date ends that class of integration. The March date ends the broader public API route.
In my view, the tradeoff is understandable but consequential for the open tooling ecosystem. Authenticated, platform-hosted automation gives Reddit a record of who is asking for data, control over rates and the ability to cut off misuse, which anonymous feeds cannot provide. For teams dealing with scraping load, that control lowers day-to-day work. For independent developers and power moderators, it removes a lightweight connection that took little setup and worked well with other tools. Whether the Devvit approach covers the legitimate uses left behind will shape if this is remembered as routine upkeep or as a narrowing. The hopeful outcome is more dependable moderation tools. The risk is less room to tinker at the edges, where many useful workflows started.
