Reddit's scraping crackdown strands readers who follow subreddits by feed

One Reddit user gets an alert for every new post in their subreddits through a Chrome extension called RSS Feed Reeder. "I don't know how I'll do that now on my desktop computer," they wrote after the announcement ^[13]. Reddit had already answered. "If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement," the company wrote ^[8].

Reddit calls RSS a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse" ^[3]. It gave a similar reason, "abusive scraping and automated traffic," for the new limits on Old Reddit ^[7]. The support thread describes a notification system. One moderation team pipes Reddit status updates into its Discord. "It's really important for us when we're in the queue and Reddit goes down to get that alert," a commenter wrote, asking whether a developer app could replace it ^[15]. The company's farewell was warm: "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," it wrote ^[12].

For moderators, the route is Discord Relay, an app on Reddit's Devvit developer platform, and Reddit wants mod teams to review their setups and migrate before Nov. 13 ^[6][14]. The announcement came on Sept. 30, so teams have 44 days ^[2][19]. The reports do not say whether Discord Relay can carry a sitewide status alert like the one that commenter described ^[6][15].

The stated target is scraping. The routes being closed are the free ones, and licensed partners keep theirs ^[9]. In the second quarter, Reddit's "other revenue" beyond advertising rose 24% from a year earlier to $43 million, up from about $34.7 million ^[17][20]. TechCrunch reports that figure next to its description of AI licensing as a profitable side business for Reddit ^[10]. Reddit closed a similar route in August 2025. It restricted the Internet Archive's ability to archive posts, comments and profiles, saying AI companies were collecting its content through the Wayback Machine ^[18].

Two questions sort any team's Reddit dependencies: whether the feed or tool serves a community the team moderates, and whether a person reads it or software acts on it. I'd inventory the unmoderated, human-read box first, because Reddit's plan gives it no destination. The tradeoff is that the other three boxes all resolve inside Reddit's developer platform or a contract with Reddit, so a team that migrates depends more on Reddit's terms than it did on an open feed ^[6][16][21].

- Moderated, read by a person: mod alerts move to Discord Relay by Nov. 13 ^[6]. - Moderated, run by software: bots go to Devvit and register before Jan. 12, 2027, with migration funding on offer ^[11][16]. - Unmoderated, read by a person: no RSS replacement exists, and Old Reddit will require a login and recent use ^[8][4]. - Unmoderated, run by software: social listening and research tools lose public API access in March 2027, and the route TechCrunch describes for AI assistants is a commercial deal with Reddit ^[21].