Reddit ending RSS is another sign the open web is closing

Opinion: this piece reflects the view of the USA Publishing Group editorial team.

“The people who pay the price are not the AI companies with the biggest budgets.”

Reddit's decision to switch off RSS feeds and close its public API is easy to understand from the company's side. Its posts have become valuable training data, and open feeds make that data easy to collect. Still, the people who pay the price are not the AI companies with the biggest budgets. They are moderators, small developers, researchers and readers, and the loss of Reddit RSS is one more sign that the open web is shrinking.

The details of the shutdown, including the timeline and Reddit's suggested alternatives, are in our news report on Reddit ending RSS feeds and its public API. This column is about what the move says about the internet we are building.

A simple tool with a big role

RSS is old, plain and quietly essential. It lets anyone follow a community without an algorithm deciding what they see. It powers alerts for volunteer moderators who keep communities running. It is one of the few ways left to read the web on your own terms.

For anyone who has never used it, RSS is just a standard format a website publishes listing its newest posts. A feed reader app checks those lists and shows new items in one place, in the order they were published. There is no ranking, no recommended content and no ads injected by the reader. You choose the sources. The software fetches them. That is the whole idea.

Its simplicity is what made it so widely useful. A moderator could point a small script at a subreddit's feed and get an alert whenever a new post appeared. A researcher could track how discussion of a topic grew over a week. A reader could follow a dozen niche communities without opening the app or creating an account. None of that needed permission, a developer key or a business relationship.

Why "just use the app" is not an answer

The obvious response is that people can still visit Reddit directly. They can, but that is a different experience. The app decides what to show and in what order, and it is designed to keep you scrolling. A feed reader shows you what you asked for and then stops. For people who use RSS to keep up with many sites at once, the value was never Reddit alone. It was having Reddit sit next to blogs, news sites and newsletters in one calm list. Every site that drops its feed pushes readers back toward separate apps and separate algorithms.

The wider pattern

Reddit is not alone. Across the internet, platforms are locking down access, adding paywalls to APIs and pulling content behind logins. Each decision has a business reason. Together they make the web harder to search, archive and study.

The common driver is clear enough. Text written by real people has become a raw material for AI systems, and the companies that host it want to control who can take it and on what terms. The economics behind that pressure are enormous, as our coverage of how much new revenue AI needs to pay for itself shows. When the stakes are that large, a free, open feed starts to look to a company like money left on the table.

But the closures rarely stop the largest players. Big AI firms can negotiate licensing deals, pay for access or run sophisticated collection systems. The people shut out are the ones without lawyers or budgets: the hobbyist who built a useful bot, the graduate student studying online communities, the volunteer moderator keeping spam off a support forum. A rule meant to protect against the powerful mostly lands on the powerless.

There is a long term cost too. Large parts of internet history live in public forums. When access shrinks, archivists and researchers lose the ability to study how communities formed, argued and changed. Future readers inherit a web that is harder to look back on.

A better balance

Platforms can fight abusive scraping without cutting off ordinary users:

• Rate limits that stop mass collection but allow personal feed readers.
• Free registered access for researchers and moderators.
• Clear licensing for commercial AI use, with smaller limits for everyone else.

None of these ideas is radical. A personal feed reader checks a handful of pages every so often. Mass scraping requests huge volumes, fast and constantly. Those patterns look very different from the server side, and platforms already have the tools to tell them apart. Treating both the same way is a policy choice, not a technical necessity.

Registered access for researchers and moderators would cost a platform little and buy a lot of goodwill. These are the people who make communities worth visiting and who help the public understand them. Licensing for commercial AI use, meanwhile, is a fair way to charge the companies that profit most, without punishing the people who never planned to profit at all.

It is fair to ask the AI industry to carry more of this weight as well. Companies building on public text have made plenty of promises about responsible behavior. As we have argued about voluntary AI safety pledges, commitments mean little without proof, and that includes how training data is gathered. As AI tools learn to browse and act on the web by themselves, a trend covered in our explainer on AI agents, the pressure on open access is only going to grow.

What readers can do

Support sites that still offer open feeds. Keep a feed reader. Follow writers and communities in more than one place. The open web survives when people use it.

A few practical steps help:

1. Keep your reader active. Many feed readers are free and work on phones and computers. Use one daily, and the habit protects itself.
2. Look for the feed first. Many blogs and news sites still publish RSS, sometimes without advertising it. A feed reader can often find it from a site's address.
3. Diversify where you follow people. If a writer or community matters to you, subscribe to a newsletter or a second platform as well, so one policy change cannot cut you off.
4. Tell publishers it matters. Sites notice when readers ask for feeds. Quiet features disappear when nobody seems to use them.

For more on how platform decisions shape what you can read and build online, follow our tech coverage.

Frequently asked questions

What is RSS and why do people still use it?

RSS is a standard way for websites to publish a list of their newest posts. Feed reader apps collect those lists so you can follow many sites in one place, in time order, without an algorithm choosing what you see.

Why is Reddit shutting off RSS?

Its posts have become valuable training data for AI, and open feeds make that data easy to collect. Closing them gives the company more control over who gathers it.

Who is most affected?

Volunteer moderators who rely on feed based alerts, small developers, researchers and readers who follow communities through feed readers.

Is RSS dying everywhere?

No. Many blogs, news sites and podcasts still publish feeds. Using them, and asking for them, is the best way to keep them around.