IT Home News on October 1st: On Wednesday local time, Reddit announced several updates for moderators and developers. Meanwhile, there is bad news for those who support a more open internet: Reddit will soon stop supporting RSS subscription sources.
According to Reddit, RSS has now become a common entry point for "large-scale data crawling and automated abuse." For this reason, the platform has decided to gradually shut down the RSS subscription source feature.
The platform stated in the announcement, "We are aware that for a long time, RSS has been a beloved part of the open internet, and we would like to thank all users who have continuously followed the content of Reddit through RSS." The announcement also revealed that the platform's public application programming interface (API) will be officially closed in March 2027.
Reddit indicates that support for the RSS feature will be discontinued starting from November 13th.
According to IT, the full name of RSS is Simple Information Aggregation (Really Simple Syndication / Rich Site Summary), which is a type of web subscription source. With this standardized format, users and various applications can obtain updated content from websites. This format was particularly popular during the era when blogs were prevalent, allowing users to subscribe to new posts on sites through news reading apps. Google once operated the most widely used RSS reader, but it was discontinued in 2013, and since then, the market share has been taken over by companies like Feedly and other independent applications.
As Reddit made the decision to shut down RSS subscription sources, the massive amount of user-generated content on this forum platform has begun to develop into a side business that can generate revenue for the company through artificial intelligence-driven data authorization transactions.
Reddit revealed that in the second quarter, "other revenues" excluding advertising increased by 24% year-on-year, reaching 43 million US dollars (Note from IT: The current exchange rate is approximately 289 million RMB). It is not difficult to understand that Reddit no longer wishes to allow these data to be freely obtained.
For moderators who previously relied on the RSS channel to receive reminders, Reddit now recommends switching to the Discord relay application on the Devvit platform. Officials have advised all moderators and their teams to reorganize their existing work settings and complete the migration of work processes before the official shutdown on November 13th to avoid any subsequent disruptions in services. However, Reddit also states that for external subscription purposes outside of the moderator community, there is currently no alternative to the RSS subscription source.
Many moderators have expressed their concerns that this change may disrupt their work processes. Earlier on, Reddit hinted that they were planning to remove the RSS feature, and at that time, many moderators complained that without RSS, it would become difficult for them to manage the forum. At the same time, a large number of ordinary users also emphasized that RSS is an important way for them to browse the content on Reddit.
The RSS related adjustments are just one of several updates released by the company on Wednesday. Another major change is that the Public Application Programming Interface ( API ) will also be discontinued soon.
The public API access permission will expire and terminate in March 2027. All tools that rely on this interface to automatically read the content of Reddit discussions will be affected as a result, including public opinion monitoring products, tools used by researchers, and AI products such as artificial intelligence assistants. Currently, these AI assistants can directly retrieve the content of Reddit to answer questions; after the public API is closed, if related products wish to obtain platform data, they will have to sign a commercial cooperation agreement with Reddit.
In addition to that, Reddit has also updated the progress of building the Rule Center (Rules Hub) as well as made related changes to the automatic moderators (auto – mod). They have also stated that they are implementing additional protection measures for the traditional text-only version of the site (Old Reddit). These protective measures include restricting access only to logged-in moderators and recently active users. Reddit also mentioned that these adjustments are made in order to address issues related to "malicious crawling and automated traffic."
Reddit indicates that within the next few months, login access rights for Old Reddit will be restricted, with only users who have used the old version of the site within the past six months being allowed to continue accessing it.
The platform also reminds developers: If you are developing third-party applications or bot programs that have already obtained permission, please make sure to complete the registration before January 12, 2027, to prevent any subsequent service interruptions. Once this date is passed, the access rights associated with your API will be revoked by Reddit for developers who have not completed registration.
