Reddit isn't closing the door on AI. It's selling the key.

I read Reddit through RSS. Not all of it, just a handful of subreddits about self-hosting, old Unix stuff and a couple of film communities. They sit in my feed reader next to blogs and tilde pages, and I read them when I want, without an algorithm, without a login, without an app begging me to turn on notifications.

On November 13, that stops working.

On September 30, Reddit announced that it's ending RSS support. For anyone reading feeds outside a community they moderate, the company said plainly that "there is no replacement". The public API goes too: no new access requests after October 31, unregistered apps cut off on January 12, 2027, and everything else gone by March 2027. Developers are being pushed onto Devvit, Reddit's own platform, with a $1 million migration fund that works out to $1,000 per app. Old Reddit, the fast, text-heavy version a lot of us still use, will be limited to logged-in moderators and people who used it in the last six months.

The reason given is the same for all of it: scraping and "automated abuse", mostly by AI bots.

I want to take that reason seriously. And then I want to ask whether it holds up.

The part that's true #

AI scraping is real, and it's ugly. Small sites have been knocked offline by crawlers that ignore robots.txt and hammer servers thousands of times a minute. Reddit sued Anthropic in June 2025, alleging its bots kept hitting Reddit more than 100,000 times after the company said it had stopped. In October 2025 it went after Perplexity and three scraping firms. Cloudflare has accused Perplexity of disguising its crawlers as ordinary Chrome browsers (Perplexity disputes this). When a bot looks like a person, it's hard to stop at the door.

There's also a fair argument about who pays. Reddit's content was written by its users for free, moderated by volunteers for free, and then hoovered up by some of the richest companies on the planet, also for free. I don't love that either.

So if the story were "Reddit is shutting AI out", I'd be annoyed about my feeds, but I'd get it.

That's not the story.

Follow the money #

In April 2023, Steve Huffman told The New York Times: "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

Notice the word free. Not "we won't give it". Just not for free.

Ten months later, Reddit's IPO prospectus disclosed data licensing contracts worth $203 million over two to three years, signed in January 2024. The S-1 itself says Reddit expects its "growing data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future LLMs." Around the same time, Google signed a deal reportedly worth about $60 million a year to train its models on Reddit. OpenAI followed in May 2024.

By its second quarter this year, Reddit's "other revenue", the bucket beyond advertising, had grown 24% to $43 million. As TechCrunch put it, it's no wonder Reddit doesn't want to give any of that data away for free.

So AI isn't being kept out of Reddit. AI is Reddit's customer. What's being kept out is everyone who isn't paying.

Who actually loses #

Think about who used RSS and the free API.

Not Google. Google has a contract. Not OpenAI. OpenAI has a contract. The AI assistants that want Reddit answers after March 2027, TechCrunch notes, will simply need commercial deals.

The people losing access are the guy with a feed reader. The researcher studying online communities who can't afford enterprise pricing. The volunteer who wrote a reminder bot in a weekend. The person who just wants to read a thread without being forced into an app.

We've seen this movie before. In 2023, Reddit started charging for the API at prices that would have cost Apollo, one of the most loved third-party clients, about $20 million a year. Apollo shut down, along with Reddit is Fun, Sync and others. Thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. Huffman called the protesting moderators "landed gentry", the same volunteers who do the unpaid work that makes the site worth scraping in the first place. The protest was crushed, and the IPO came the following March.

Then, in July 2024, Reddit changed its robots.txt to block nearly every search engine except Google. Bing, DuckDuckGo and Mojeek stopped showing recent Reddit results. Reddit said it wasn't related to the Google deal. Maybe. But the effect was that one of the largest pools of human conversation on the web became, for fresh content, searchable through one company. Ars Technica pointed out that Reddit had just helped tighten Google's grip on search. The same robots.txt file, by the way, says: "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content."

RSS is just the last open window being closed.

That's what Big Tech looks like #

I'm careful with the phrase "Big Tech". Reddit isn't Meta. But you don't need to be huge to act like this. The playbook is familiar:

• Grow on open protocols and free contributions.
• Close the protocols once you're the default place to be.
• Push developers onto your own platform, under your own rules.
• Sell access to the few companies big enough to pay.
• Call the whole thing safety.

Twitter did it with its API. Google did it to RSS when it killed Reader. Now Reddit is doing it, and the AI excuse makes it sound almost noble.

And honestly, calling it "centralization" isn't quite enough. Reddit was always a centralized company. The real shift is from a site that also spoke the open web's languages to one that only speaks its own. Information that used to flow out freely, to readers, archives, search engines and tiny tools, now flows out through a toll booth, and only toward buyers.

The irony nobody can ignore #

Reddit's co-founders include Aaron Swartz, who as a teenager helped write the RSS 1.0 specification. He spent his short life fighting to make information free to read, and died while being prosecuted for downloading academic papers.

I don't want to put words in a dead man's mouth. Reddit is a company, and companies change. But it's hard not to notice that a site built partly by one of RSS's authors is now killing RSS, while selling the same content to Google and OpenAI. Reddit's own announcement even calls RSS "a beloved part of the open web". They know exactly what they're turning off.

Where I land #

Is Reddit protecting users? A little. Stopping abusive scraping is legitimate, and suing companies that lie about their crawlers is fine by me.

But if this were about protecting users, the users would see some of the money. They don't. If it were about stopping AI, the biggest AI companies wouldn't have contracts. They do. And if it were only about abuse, there are ways to rate-limit a feed reader without killing RSS for everybody.

What's happening is simpler: Reddit decided that conversations written by millions of people are inventory, and inventory isn't given away. Not to scrapers, but also not to you, your feed reader, your researcher friend or the Internet Archive of the future.

The lesson for me is the same one the small web keeps teaching. If you care about something you wrote, put it somewhere you control. A blog with an RSS feed. A tilde page. A forum you host. Platforms will always remember, eventually, that your words are their product.

In the meantime, tools like RSS-Bridge and RSSHub may keep some of those feeds alive for a while. I'll set them up. I just don't expect Reddit to make it easy.