Overview
- Reddit announced a staged shutdown that stops new API requests on October 31, ends RSS support on November 13, begins removing access for unregistered apps on January 12, 2027, and terminates remaining public API access in March 2027.
- The company framed the moves as anti-abuse steps, saying RSS and open API routes had become common surfaces for large-scale scraping and automated traffic.
- Reddit is urging moderators to migrate RSS-based moderation alerts to its Discord Relay Devvit app and is offering migration funding and technical support for approved apps and bots.
- Independent feed readers, third-party apps, social-listening tools and academic researchers will lose or need to rework programmatic access to conversations outside communities they moderate, with no replacement for non-moderator RSS feeds.
- The changes follow earlier limits on archival access and come as Reddit has expanded AI licensing deals and nonadvertising revenue, raising questions about platform control, data monetization and web preservation.