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 millions of those together while hundreds of millions of users are simultaneously using the site for non-feed content, and even a site like Reddit, with a beefy infrastructure and a ton of servers, could buckle under the load.
The Slack and Discord integrations Reddit mods rely on are automated fetchers, and can be adding to the problem too. When built well, no abuse. But built badly, and they behave exactly like the data-hungry bots Reddit says it's fighting, which is why so many sites block feed readers now — right along with the bad bots. So when Reddit says its feeds are a scraping surface contributing to the abuse, they're not just making it up.
Cutting access to feeds won't fix the abuse problem
So Reddit doesn't want a bot or automated tool using their RSS feeds to abuse the site — fine. But if they're thinking about cutting off access to the feeds from everyone else using them legitimately, not only would that be a bad move, it won't fix the problem. RSS feeds aren't the only way the site can be abused. And if bots and tools are checking the site (or the feeds) for content too often, that's what rate limits and caching are for (which people already suggested in that thread, btw). You fix a leaky faucet by fixing the faucet, not by shutting off the water to the whole house.
Although if a platform is going to kill its feeds, it usually doesn't happen overnight. Their feeds just magically stop working as a side effect of some other change they announce, almost exactly like what Reddit is doing in this post:
- Twitter didn't announce the end of feeds. It retired the old version of its API in 2013, and support for feeds went with it.
- Facebook never said it was dropping feeds either. The endpoint that powered its page feeds was buried in a routine API update and stopped returning data in mid-2015.
- Google framed killing Reader as routine housekeeping, and a chunk of the open web's plumbing went with it.
Where this leaves us
Fortunately, Reddit has kept feeds working long after other platforms let theirs rot, so it's nice to see they're at least asking for feedback about it. But you can read a post like this two ways. Reddit genuinely wants input. Or the whole post is just corporate double-speak for "we're about to get rid of our RSS feeds, we just wanna know how loud the blowback will be."
So good for all the Reddit users who are rightfully defending keeping RSS feeds available in that post, especially while it's still a question and not an announcement. The best argument against Reddit flipping the switch on their feeds is a pile of real people describing how much they depend on them.
Honestly, Reddit. You may have been a little tone-deaf lately to your most dedicated users and lack the ability to read the room on occasion. But when it comes to feeds, you've always been one of the good ones. So please, not you too.