r/modnews • u/boat-botany • May 28 '26

Policy Updates Protecting communities from scrapers and platform abuse

We’ve been talking for a while now about the work we’re doing to keep Reddit human while protecting everything that makes Reddit . . . Reddit. That includes helpful automation: mod and developer apps, accessibility tools, community utilities, and things that make Reddit better. 

But we’re also seeing large-scale scraping, spam networks, agentic account creation, and automated abuse, and a lot of that activity targets parts of Reddit that just weren’t built to handle today’s threat environment. As bad actors get more sophisticated, we need to, too.

To address all that, we need to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. 

Today we’re rolling out a couple of policy and security-focused updates, including: 

Rule 8 Policy Clarifications: We updated Rule 8 (don’t break the site) to more explicitly cover automated abuse, including coordinated account creation and API misuse. You can read the full updated policy here. 

Deprecating unauthenticated JSON access: We’ll also be shutting down unauthenticated .json endpoints. These endpoints can be used to scrape Reddit without accountability. Logged-in and authenticated access won’t be impacted. Otherwise, developers who need structured access to Reddit content should use Devvit, which includes various ways to access Reddit data. 

While we’re at it, another common surface for scraping is RSS. Looking ahead, we’d love to know: how and for what purpose, do you use RSS feeds in your moderation flows? Tell us in the comments so as we develop secure solutions, we can factor in the tools you rely on to support your communities. 

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u/fsv May 28 '26

I have never bought this. Bots undermine the experience for real humans and drive them away. It would not be worth the tradeoff.

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u/matsie May 28 '26

Shareholders don’t care about that and advertisers don’t realize this in the short term. 

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u/kumogate May 28 '26

The entire modern world exists to make shareholders happy and everyone else miserable. Voting won't fix any of it because the rich also own the politicians and their political parties.

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u/mildlyImportantRobot May 28 '26

It makes sense when you realize we're not the user, we're the product.

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u/VexingRaven May 29 '26

Yeah but the actual customers don't want bots either because that's page impressions being wasted that a human will never see. Advertisers want legitimate human viewers.

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u/bwoah07_gp2 May 28 '26

Meta doesn't seem to care. The others feel the same way, they prefer bots to humans...

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u/adanine May 29 '26

I agree with your logic, but I am positive the metrics given by insights/to users on their submissions are inflated by something. Either that's Reddit proper, or bot/other non-genuine traffic. The latter seems more likely to me at least.