Reddit RSS feeds shut down on 13 November over AI scraping

Reddit RSS feeds shut down on 13 November over AI scraping

Reddit’s elimination of RSS and restricted API access fundamentally undermines the infrastructure many open data researchers rely on for automated content aggregation. By prioritizing protection against AI scraping over transparent data access, the platform obscures public discourse, making large-scale historical analysis significantly harder to conduct without explicit permission. The closure of public API endpoints and the deprecation of legacy tools like Automod signal a shift toward closed ecosystems. This limits the ability of third parties and civic technologists to build independent tools that monitor, archive, or analyze community trends, effectively silencing the open web’s capacity for independent verification and archival. This move is critical to open data discourse as it demonstrates how major platforms can unilaterally restrict data flows under the guise of security. It highlights the urgent need for standardized, open protocols that preserve public interest access to digital commons, ensuring that societal data remains retrievable despite corporate decisions to privatize or obscure information streams.

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