Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on 13 November, blaming AI scraping. RSS is now widely used for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, the company said in a post to moderators on Wednesday.

RSS lets people follow a site’s new posts in a feed reader. Moderators who use it for alerts can move to a Discord Relay app instead, Reddit said. Everyone else loses it.

“If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement,” Reddit wrote.

Reddit is also tightening access to Old Reddit, the site’s classic text-heavy design. It already requires people to log in. In the next few months, only moderators and people who used it in the past six months will keep access. That covers “the vast majority” of its users, Reddit said.

Public API access ends in March 2027, Reddit said in a separate post for developers. It will stop accepting new API requests on 31 October. From 12 January, it will start cutting off apps that have not registered.

More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered to move to its Developer Platform. Reddit is paying $1,000 to each eligible app that completes the move, from a $1m fund.

New communities, and those that have never used Automod, also lose the tool’s power to remove, filter or approve posts. Rules Hub and Automations become the default for enforcing rules.

Moderators push back

Moderators criticised the changes in the replies. Some said losing Automod would lead to more bans.

“RSS is the only way I find out about posts in subs like this one,” one moderator wrote.

Reddit first set out these plans in August, when it replaced parts of Automod with AI rules enforcement. In July, Reddit was weighing whether to cut Google off from its content. Cloudflare’s chief executive said this week that bot traffic could reach 1,000 times human traffic.