Key takeaways

On May 28, 2026, Reddit announced it is deprecating unauthenticated .json endpoints — within days, appending .json to a URL started returning 403, silently breaking most open-source Reddit scrapers.

The real driver is AI and money: Reddit's two decades of human conversation became a licensed AI-training asset (~$130M in 2024 from deals with Google and OpenAI), and free scraping undercut it — so Reddit is gating the data and suing those who take it without paying.

Reddit's stated reason is scraping 'without accountability,' bot and agentic abuse, and a clarified Rule 8; it is steering developers to authenticated access and Devvit — and has flagged RSS as the next surface to close.

You can still get public Reddit data compliantly — the official (paid) API, authenticated access, or a managed API that keeps the access path working and returns normalized JSON — but the free append-.json era is over.

For years, the simplest way to get structured data out of Reddit was a trick everyone knew:…