Reddit Blamed Scrapers for Killing RSS, But Its Earnings Call Tells a Different Story
Reddit's feeds were little more than headlines and links back to Reddit. What the company told investors a month later explains the shutdown better.
If you followed a subreddit in a feed reader, you know how little you got. Each post arrived as a headline, a small picture and a link back to Reddit. There were no comments, no votes and no videos. To see any of that, you had to click through to Reddit itself.
On November 13, Reddit turns those feeds off. It says RSS has become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," meaning bots using the feeds to copy Reddit in bulk. That's hard to square with how little was in them. A month after the announcement, Reddit gave its investors an explanation that fits much better.
Reddit's side of it
To be fair, Reddit's scraping problem is real. Last year it sued Anthropic, saying the AI company's bots kept visiting Reddit after it said they'd stopped, and then sued Perplexity and three data companies for copying Reddit posts out of Google's search results. To prove that one, Reddit says it planted a post only Google could see, and it turned up in Perplexity's answers within hours. This year Reddit has been closing the back doors that bots use to get in, and feeds were one of the last ones open.
There wasn't much to take
But the valuable part of Reddit is the comments, and the RSS feeds never had them. Comments are what Reddit licenses to Google and OpenAI, and what AI companies actually want. A bot reading Reddit's feeds got headlines, most of them written by other publishers and already in Google, plus links back to Reddit. Reddit had also already slowed its feeds to a crawl in June, without telling anyone, as Jeff Johnson noticed. And as far as anyone has reported, neither lawsuit had anything to do with feeds. If headlines and links are a scraper's dream, scrapers have modest dreams.
What Reddit told investors
On October 29, CEO Steve Huffman announced that Reddit will become a mostly logged-in site, starting with tests outside the US. On the earnings call that day, he laid out why. People who are logged in can be shown better-targeted ads, they're harder to scrape, and they already bring in more than 80% of Reddit's revenue. He said plainly that Reddit expects to lose some visitors along the way.
A feed reader is the opposite of all that. Nobody logs in, nobody sees an ad, and Reddit learns nothing about who's reading. In the business Huffman described, a feed reader is a reader Reddit can't make money from, and RSS was never going to survive a login screen.
The popular theory is that Reddit is locking up its posts to sell them to AI companies, and that's only half right. Data licensing and Reddit's other side businesses brought in about $140 million last year, out of $2.2 billion. Almost all the rest came from ads. The bigger prize isn't the data. It's you, signed in, looking at an ad.
What Reddit gives up
Every post in a Reddit feed was an invitation to visit Reddit, and feed readers sent those visitors for free. That should matter more now, because Huffman also said visits from Google fell by more than a million a week in October. Reddit is losing free traffic from one direction and has decided to give up another. It's a defensible business decision. It just isn't the one Reddit announced.
Closing one door at a time
RSS is the latest in a long line. In 2023 Reddit started charging apps for access to its data, at prices that shut down Apollo and other popular apps and set off a protest across thousands of subreddits. In 2024 it signed its first AI data deals and went public. Since then it has blocked every search engine but Google from showing new posts, cut off the Wayback Machine, and this year started closing logged-out access piece by piece, with the rest of its public data access ending in March.
Each step came with a reason, and some of the reasons were good. Together they describe a company turning a public website into a private one. Reddit's shareholders now have a stake in its users' posts that the users never had, and to a public company, every open door is money walking out of the building.
Reddit's announcement even paid tribute to RSS as a long-loved part of the open web. And that's the problem: the open web is the one part of Reddit you can't put a login screen in front of.