Go Easy on the Feeds, Reddit

There's a particular kind of sigh you let out when a platform you once loved starts making the same moves you've watched a dozen other sites make right before they got worse. Well, Reddit just made one.

On May 28th, a Reddit admin posted in the moderator news community, and tucked inside the cheerfully-titled "protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse" (archived) was a line that made a lot of us wince. Reddit wants to know how people use its RSS feeds, because they're "another common surface for scraping."

If you've been around long enough to remember when all these large sites started walking the feeds we rely on to the woodshed, you know how this tends to go.

What Reddit actually said about its feeds

To be clear, Reddit hasn't announced it's dropping RSS feeds, at least not in this post. They're just requesting feedback from the mods on how they use them in their work so that, as they "develop secure solutions," they can account for the tools you depend on.

Not sure if anyone really knows what that gibberish means, but hey—it sounds nice. It's also the sound of someone telling you they aren't redecorating while measuring your living room for new furniture.

First the open developer access got a huge price hike that killed a wave of third-party apps we loved, which none of us were happy about. Then, some data endpoints got cut as announced in this very post, and now their feeds have entered the chat too. It's not hard to connect the dots.

Reddit isn't entirely wrong

The Reddit post implies that the site is being abused and their RSS feeds are being used to do it. Feeds are kind of our thing around here and we're no strangers to how readers and feed bots tend to misbehave, so including some of them in the abusive category isn't unwarranted, or all that surprising.

In order for feed readers to work properly, they have to keep checking a site's feeds for new content, and a lot of them tend to do these checks far more often than they need to. Pile…