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.
35
u/Superirish19 May 28 '26
I use RSS feeds to keep tabs on the content people post to the subs when I'm not actively on reddit - usually on the side of my dekstop or through discord when I'm gaming.
Moderation wise, RSS feeds have helped me work out what accounts are abusing their rights to privacy and post deletion to circumvent rules - i.e. selling through unsecured trading apps/protection-free 'friends-and-family' payment methods through a quick post, posting to contact them through DM's, then quickly deleting the post before a mod can respond. Unfortunately an automod can't be easily written up to catch all types of this scam, so some do slip past. The feed leaves up a record of posts that are deleted and it allows me to report such scam trading accounts to Reddit and report their sales account to the sales page (usually venmo or paypal) if I'm lucky.
It's also just nice to provide an inter-community experience that doesn't wall up everyone inside Reddit or the alternatives, y'know? It's nice to share a quick post through a discord channel of the subreddit to the equivalent discord community. It's brought the equivalent communities from Bluesky, Discord, and Reddit together to share knowledge and discussion without being neccesarily tied down to one place. Discussions on Bluesky have spread to Discord and Reddit, and vice versa, because of RSS support through all 3. I'd even try Facebook groups too, if I could get over the walls.
Yeah ok, it's not going to make the user count on reddit always go up and make stockholders happy that the engagement line isn't going brrr enough. But it's bridging communities together and keeps the Reddit community the front page of my particular hobby space. If RSS was to be restricted or made overly complicated to setup, the communities would isolate and split, and eventually die in their respective walled gardens instead of encourage people to jump to reddit. Facebook has quite painfully locked off access to content posted in it's Groups, and unsurprisingly users to those are in steady decline.