June 12 2026
For years, I’ve followed Reddit via RSS. I mentioned Reddit RSS feeds in a 2022 blog post. Among the various ways my customers can contact me, there’s a subreddit for my products. I follow a number of Apple-related subreddits such as r/apple, which is helpful to me in unearthing information relevant to my business and helpful to redditors, whose technical questions I sometimes answer. I also follow a few local, Wisconsin-area subreddits. Overall, I subscribe to around 25 Reddit RSS feeds. This worked fairly well until yesterday afternoon. Suddenly, all of my Reddit RSS feeds started returning HTTP 429 Too Many Requests. The issue continued into this morning, and I found confirmation in a couple of Reddit posts:
Reddit seems to have severly [sic] rate limited their RSS feeds
The previous rate limit was 100 updates per 10 minutes. After some investigation I found that the current rate limit is 1 update per 1 minute.
Did Reddit change the rate limit?
It looks like only the first request in each batch works, then the others fail. In the headers, I see:
x-ratelimit-used: 1 x-ratelimit-remaining: 0.0 x-ratelimit-reset: 58I've never looked at this before so I might be misinterpreting, but it seems like it's saying you get one request every 60 seconds?
I tried adding my Reddit account authentication to my RSS feeds—previously they were unauthenticated—but that did not stop the 429 errors.
However, I did eventually discover a solution that works so far in my testing: I added user= and feed= parameters to the RSS feed URLs. You can obtain these for your own Reddit account by looking at your Reddit RSS feeds preferences. Your URL parameters are the same for every RSS feed.
This idea came to me because I already had a few private RSS feeds for moderation purposes with user= and feed= URL parameters. It turns out that the parameters can also be applied to any public feed, including /search/.rss feeds!
This new RSS rate limiting was perhaps foreshadowed by an r/modnews post a couple of weeks ago:
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.
Otherwise, though, I’m not aware of an official announcement from Reddit. Hopefully Reddit does not cut off the user= and feed= method. Without RSS feeds, I would personally abandon Reddit. I’m not interested in manually visiting the website just to check for updates, like a savage.