Reddit Is Closing Off the Open Web, One Restriction at a Time

Key Takeaways

• Reddit announced it will limit Old Reddit access to logged-in users who have used the site within the previous six months, building on a July requirement that users be logged in at all to access Old Reddit.
• RSS feed support will be discontinued on November 13, with no replacement for users who relied on it outside of moderator workflows.
• Reddit describes both changes as efforts to reduce scraping and automated abuse. Critics and longtime users see a platform steadily closing off anonymous, unauthenticated access to its content.
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman previously said Old Reddit would remain "online as long as people are using it." In August, he changed course, saying the platform needs to make "some changes."
• Each restriction makes it harder to access Reddit without an account, without logging in, and without Reddit knowing who you are.

In July, Reddit started requiring users to be logged in to access Old Reddit — the stripped-down, chronological version of the site that many longtime users prefer for its layout, lack of algorithmic ranking, and general refusal to be an engagement-optimization machine. On September 30th, Reddit announced the next step: in the coming months, logged-in access to Old Reddit will be restricted to users who have visited it within the previous six months, with an exception for moderators.

Reddit says the July login requirement "helped reduce scraping and automated abuse," and that the new six-month activity gate serves the same purpose — preserving Old Reddit for people who rely on it while reducing automated traffic. A Reddit spokesperson told Ars Technica that the changes are "not removing Old Reddit for people and moderators who rely on it."

That framing is worth examining. The current rules, Reddit's own post notes, allow any logged-in account to access Old Reddit — including accounts with no prior Old Reddit use. Reddit didn't explain why that's a problem worth solving. An account is an account. If the concern is bots and scrapers, those can create accounts. What the activity gate actually does is increase the removal of casual or infrequent users, making the eventual case for shutting Old Reddit down easier to make.

RSS Is Just Gone

The more significant change for the open web is the RSS announcement. On November 13th, Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds entirely — except for moderators using them in specific workflows, who will be pointed toward a Reddit-built alternative. For everyone else, there's no replacement. Reddit's announcement acknowledged this plainly: "If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement."

RSS is one of the foundational protocols of the open web. It lets people subscribe to content from any source in any reader, without going through an app, without logging in, and without being tracked. Reddit killing RSS support doesn't break RSS — the protocol will continue to exist everywhere else. 

But it removes Reddit from the set of places the open web can reach without Reddit's permission, and it does so explicitly because unauthenticated, non-personalized access has become inconvenient for the platform's data and monetization model.

"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," the announcement said — in the same post announcing its removal.

The Direction of Travel

Reddit's justification for both changes is anti-scraping. That's a real problem: large-scale automated scraping of Reddit content for AI training has been well-documented, and Reddit has legitimate commercial grievances with it. 

But the mechanism chosen to address scraping — requiring login, requiring recent activity, removing open protocols — applies to everyone, not just scrapers. The person who reads Reddit occasionally through an RSS reader isn't a bot. The user who accessed Old Reddit three months ago and just came back isn't automated abuse.

What these changes have in common is that they move Reddit further from a place you can access without identifying yourself and further toward a platform that knows who you are every time you visit. That's a direction of travel with a clear destination: a fully authenticated, fully tracked, fully monetizable user base, with the open web left outside. Anti-scraping is a real concern. It's also a convenient frame for a much broader closure.