Reddit to restrict Old Reddit, end RSS feeds and public API in fight against AI scraping

In a post on r/modnews, Reddit said that in the next few months it will limit the 21-year-old desktop version, known as Old Reddit, to logged-in users who have used the classic layout recently. The Verge and Engadget reported the requirement as use within the last six months, while TechCrunch and Slashdot described it as the last 90 days. Reddit said the window covers “the vast majority of all Old Reddit users.” New accounts and logged-in users who have not used Old Reddit in that period will be barred, though logged-in moderators will not be subject to the recent-usage requirement.

The change follows an earlier step in which Reddit began forcing users to log in to use Old Reddit. Reddit said that requirement “helped reduce scraping and automated abuse” but “still allowed any logged-in account to access Old Reddit, including accounts with no prior Old Reddit use.” The company has not said whether it will eventually abandon Old Reddit. CEO Steve Huffman said in May 2025 that Reddit would “keep it online as long as people are using it,” but in August he said the company had reached a point where “we need to make some changes” because the experience was used by “everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit.” Engadget reported that Huffman’s “dream” for Old Reddit would be to “recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on.”

Reddit also said it will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13. The company described RSS as “now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” “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,” Reddit said. For moderators who used RSS channels for alerts, Reddit recommended switching to the Discord Relay Devvit app. It said there is no replacement for RSS feeds used outside a community they moderate. TechCrunch reported that moderators had already expressed concern about how the change would affect their workflows, and many users said RSS was how they accessed Reddit content.

Public API access will also end by March 2027, Reddit said, affecting tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, research tools and AI assistants. Such products will need commercial deals with Reddit for its data. Reddit said developers building approved third-party apps and bots must register them with the company before January 12, 2027; after that date, it will remove API access for developers who have not registered. The company is moving apps and bots that use its public data API to its Developer Platform.

Reddit has been fighting unsanctioned access to its data for some time. It has blocked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to prevent AI scraping, sued Anthropic over alleged unauthorized bot access, and struck deals with Google and OpenAI to use Reddit data for training. TechCrunch reported that Reddit’s “other revenue” beyond advertising grew 24 percent year over year to $43 million in its second quarter, as its user-generated forum content has become a profitable source of AI licensing deals.