Reddit API, RSS and JSON Changes: What’s Shutting Down and When

Reddit has set firm dates for the next phase of its infrastructure overhaul. RSS feeds will go dark on November 13, 2026. Third-party apps and bots must move to the company’s Developer Platform. Old Reddit will be restricted further. The company says the changes are meant to make the site harder to scrape and abuse.

The announcement, posted in r/modnews, builds on plans Reddit first outlined in August. It turns them into concrete deadlines for moderators and developers.

RSS is going away, mostly without a replacement

Reddit says RSS has become a common channel for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, so it will stop supporting feeds on November 13. Moderators who rely on RSS-based alerts are told to switch to Devvit apps such as Discord Relay before the cutoff.

Everyone else is out of luck. People who use RSS to follow communities they don’t moderate will get no alternative, a point Reddit states plainly. The company signed off with a nod to RSS as a long-loved part of the open web. For the feed-reader crowd, that is little comfort.

JSON endpoints already locked down

RSS is not the first door to close. Reddit has already shut off unauthenticated access to its .json endpoints, the long-standing trick of adding “.json” to any Reddit URL to get structured data. Those endpoints now respond only to logged-in, authenticated users. For years they were the easiest way to pull posts and comments without touching the official API. With them gated and RSS on the way out, anonymous programmatic access to Reddit is almost gone.

Bots and apps: register by January 12

Reddit says more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered so far. It is tracking the migration of high-activity tools such as DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot and RemindMeBot. Maintainers must register their apps before January 12, 2027 to avoid disruption.

Communities that depend on a bot with an unknown maintainer can flag it through a dedicated form. Reddit says it has received over 100 submissions so far.

The companion r/redditdev post sets out the wider API timeline:

• October 31, 2026: no new public API access requests are accepted.
• January 12, 2027: removals begin for apps that haven’t registered.
• March 2027: remaining public API access ends.

Automod loses its teeth in new communities

Communities that already use AutoModerator see no change. In newly created communities, and in those that have never used it, Automod’s enforcement actions will be disabled: Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as spam and Approve. Rules Hub and Automations become the default enforcement path instead. Automod’s non-enforcement features stay as they are.

Reddit says it is also exploring ways to carry existing Automod configurations over into its newer tools. It has opened a pilot program for moderators who want to help shape Rules Hub.

Old Reddit narrows further

Earlier this year, Reddit required users to log in to use Old Reddit, which it called the biggest source of abusive scraping on the legacy interface. Now it is going further. Within the next few months, logged-in access will be limited to accounts that have used Old Reddit in the past six months. Moderators are exempt. Reddit says the restriction still covers the vast majority of current Old Reddit users.

The bigger picture: Reddit data is no longer a free resource

Taken together, these changes close most of the remaining open doors to Reddit’s data:

• .json endpoints now work only for authenticated users.
• Old Reddit now requires a login and recent activity.
• RSS ends in weeks.
• The public API ends in March.

What remains is licensed access, development inside Reddit’s own Devvit ecosystem, or scraping against the terms of service. That last option is getting more expensive, and Reddit has shown it is willing to take it to court.

That puts a whole category of businesses at risk. Brand-monitoring tools, lead-generation services, social listening platforms, Reddit-powered newsletters and AI research pipelines were largely built on cheap or free access to Reddit content. Large players can afford commercial data deals. Small, Reddit-dependent SaaS products with thin margins mostly cannot.

Parsing Reddit is only going to get harder from here, and many Reddit-based SaaS tools are unlikely to survive the transition.

Moderators push back

The comments under Reddit’s announcement were overwhelmingly negative. Many moderators see the Old Reddit restriction as a slow shutdown, and several said they would leave the platform when it closes. Others pointed out a loophole: moderators are exempt, so scrapers can simply create an empty subreddit and keep access. The AutoMod change drew the sharpest criticism. Moderators say Rules Hub and Automations still can’t match AutoMod’s flexibility, and warn that without filters they’ll have to ban suspected spammers outright.

RSS users and bot developers feel left behind too. Many commenters relied on RSS readers to follow dozens of subreddits and said they would cut back on Reddit. Developers worry about rewriting years of Python bots for Devvit. Some also flagged Reddit’s plans to randomize comment IDs, which could break archive projects like Arctic Shift.