Reddit turns off RSS on 13 November. I checked my lead feed and found its backup had never run

On 30 September 2026 Reddit said it will stop supporting RSS on 13 November.

TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reported that Reddit called RSS "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse."

I read that and thought about one thing. My lead routine.

The routine that finds editing work for VALORAE Media starts with Reddit. Its first step polls the for-hire subreddits through RSS and adds new hiring posts to a sheet.

So I went to plan the migration.

And found the backup had never worked.

Step 1: read the dates, not the headline

There are four dates in this announcement and they hit different people.

From the reporting by TechCrunch and The Next Web:

• 31 October 2026: Reddit stops accepting new requests for public API access.
• 13 November 2026: RSS feeds end.
• 12 January 2027: apps and users that have not registered start getting cut off.
• March 2027: public API access ends.

For anyone reading Reddit through a feed, 13 November is the one that matters.

Moderators get a path. Reddit points them to Discord Relay, an app on its Developer Platform. TechCrunch says there is nothing equivalent for anyone else.

Step 2: find out whether your feed is running today

This is the complication, and it is mine.

The routine had two parts. A scheduled sweep that runs the poller as its first step. And a background job on my Mac that was meant to run the same poller every 20 minutes, as a safety net.

I opened the safety net's log today.

186 lines. Every single one is the same error: the operating system refusing to let the job open the script.

The last line was written on 21 July. After that the job stopped being scheduled at all, and nothing told me.

It never ran once.

Nobody noticed, because the scheduled sweep kept running the poller from a different path, and leads kept arriving. The backup looked like it existed. It was a file and a schedule and nothing else.

I wrote about this exact failure on 29 September in a check that finds nothing passes. A job that fails silently looks identical to a job with nothing to report.

I did not take my own advice.

Step 3: list everything that depends on a free door

Reddit's RSS was free, needed no login, and worked from my machine. That is why I picked it.

It is also why it was always going to close. Reddit is selling access to its content now. TechCrunch puts its "other revenue" line, the one that carries AI licensing, at $43 million for the second quarter of 2026.

A company with that line does not keep an unauthenticated firehose open.

So I made a list of every lead source that rests on someone else's free door:

• Reddit RSS, closing 13 November.
• Public posts on platforms I read while logged in, which can change their rules any day.
• Communities that let me read a jobs channel today and can lock it tomorrow.

Then I asked what I own outright. Inbound forms on our own sites. Email replies. People who come back.

That second list is shorter. It is also the only one nobody can switch off.

Step 4: decide what replaces the feed

I considered three options.

Move to the Developer Platform. Reddit wants apps on Devvit, where Reddit hosts them. That suits tools built for communities. A one-person lead reader is not that, and I would be building on terms that already changed once.

Scrape the pages. No. Reddit is closing doors precisely because of scraping, and I do not want a lead pipeline that works until the day it gets an account banned.

Read it by hand. A logged-in browser, the same for-hire subreddits, once a day, at human pace. Slower. Honest. Nothing to break silently, because a person is looking.

I am taking the third, and putting more weight on the sources we own.

That is less automated than what I had. It is also more reliable than what I really had, which was one working path and one imaginary backup.

Step 5: check the boring part before the deadline

Here is the checklist I wish I had run in July, for any automated source:

Does it run? Open the log. Read the last ten lines. Not the schedule, the log.

Does it produce? When did it last add something real? If you cannot answer, it may be dead.

Who can switch it off? If the answer is a company you do not pay, write down what happens the day they do.

What replaces it? Decide before the deadline, not after the first empty week.

None of this is clever. It just has to happen on a calendar.

Step 6: watch for the same door closing elsewhere

Reddit is not alone in this. Every platform that hosts what people write is deciding what to charge AI companies for it.

That ripples down to small operators who were never the target. A clipping agency or editing business that reads public posts for leads is collateral.

If you are an editor hunting work rather than an agency, VALORAE Cast's post on where editing clients are, platform by platform covers channels that do not depend on a feed.

Step 7: be honest about what the dead backup cost

I do not know what it cost. That is the uncomfortable part.

The main sweep kept running, so leads kept arriving. The backup existed for the days the sweep did not run, and I cannot tell you how many of those there were, or what was posted on them.

A for-hire post that sits for a day usually has replies by the time anyone else sees it. So a missed day is not a missed lead on paper. It is a slower reply in practice.

I would rather write that down than pretend the gap was zero.

The fix for the future is small. The routine now has one job that runs, and a person who reads its output. When the feed closes on 13 November, nothing will need to fail quietly, because nothing will be pretending to run.

The short version

• Reddit RSS ends 13 November 2026, per TechCrunch's report of the 30 September announcement.
• New public API requests stop 31 October. Public API access ends March 2027.
• Open your feed's log today. A schedule is not proof it runs.
• List every lead source that rests on someone else's free door.
• Do not replace a closed feed with scraping.
• Put more weight on sources you own, and read the rest by hand.

I write about building and running agencies at tgsidd.com.