Audit your subreddit scan before it goes quiet
Before the feed dies, assign an owner, a replacement, and a deadline to every subreddit scan in your weekly review.
Your weekly review starts with a daily subreddit scan. Reddit will stop RSS feed support on November 13. Before the feed goes quiet, assign an owner, a replacement, and a written gap note to every scan.
For a small team, the feed is a cheap signal source. It carries support questions, competitor chatter, and customer complaints before they reach your inbox. When the feed stops, the loss is the unowned habit that used to catch problems early.
Reddit cited widespread scraping and automated abuse on RSS as the reason for ending RSS feeds. That reason does not change the operational task: your review still needs a reliable way to see community chatter.
The access timeline makes the problem longer than a feed change. New public API requests stop being accepted on October 31. Starting January 12, 2027, Reddit will begin revoking API access from apps and users that have not registered or responded to outreach. Reddit plans to terminate its public API in March 2027. If your scan depends on a tool that uses developer access, that tool may need a migration plan before your next review.
More than 14,000 apps and bots had registered to move to Reddit's Developer Platform. That number is not a comfort for a small team. The migration is crowded, and the tools you rely on may change.
Reddit recommends the Discord Relay Devvit app for moderator RSS alerts and offers no replacement for RSS feeds outside a community a user moderates. If you are not a moderator, do not assume the recommended path covers your scan.
Treat the scan as a ritual with a documented exit. Decide what each subreddit is for, who owns it, and what happens if it disappears.
Make the scan an owned operating item
Run the checklist in the same document you use for the weekly review. Each item should be quick to check. If an item cannot be checked quickly, move it to a project.
- Name an owner for each subreddit feed, and write the owner's name in the review document.
- Mark each feed as keep, move, or retire in a column.
- Confirm that kept feeds have an in-app check on the weekly agenda.
- Choose a tool you can moderate for moved feeds, and record the migration date.
- Write the gap left by retired feeds, and name who will cover that gap.
- Set a deadline for the replacement or gap note, and add it to the next review.
Keep the feed if it is already part of your normal in-app check. If you already open the subreddit during the week, the ritual survives without a feed. The owner still needs to note that the check is manual.
Move the feed when it matters but needs a tool. A tool you moderate gives you a place to tag support signals, competitor mentions, and customer complaints. The owner should record the tool name, the migration date, and the review where the new source appears.
Retire the feed when it no longer changes a decision. If a subreddit has not produced an action in your recent reviews, the gap note should say what you are giving up. That note tells the next owner what to watch for.
Name the owner before the deadline
A feed without an owner becomes a shared habit, and shared habits are the easiest to drop. A named owner turns the shutdown into a task with a date. An unnamed owner turns it into a surprise.
The access timeline forces another question: who owns the tool that reads the feed? If your scan uses a reader, a bot, or a dashboard, that tool needs the same treatment. The owner should know whether it depends on a feed, developer access, or manual checking.
Look for a migration path when the reader is not one you run. Confirm a bot you run has registered for developer access. Confirm the owner has time in the weekly review when the scan is manual.
Write the gap note
A retired feed is a documented decision. The note should name the signal you are losing, the place you will look instead, and the person responsible for noticing the difference.
The gap note can point support chatter to the product page and the help center, competitor chatter to a few public sources with changes noted in the weekly review, and customer chatter to the community thread where the question appeared.
The gap note should be visible in the next review so the next owner can see it.