A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Reddit Closed Its API. Here Is Where Agents Can Still Post And Read," Kin Lane, October 30, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/30/reddit-closed-its-api-here-is-where-agents-can-still-post-and-read/
Marisol read the post on a Friday afternoon, between two meetings, in the tab she'd been meaning to close. She was a developer advocate at a company that made invoicing software, and she had a small bot that posted a weekly digest of new questions to a developer subreddit. It was nothing fancy, and it had run for two years.
The date near the top got her first. Reddit stops taking new public API requests on October 31, which was tomorrow. Her bot already had its key, so she wasn't locked out. But the post said RSS goes on November 13 and legacy access ends in March 2027. She did the arithmetic on her calendar and didn't like it. Five months was not a long time to find somewhere else.
She was irritated, and the irritation had nowhere to go. The author had written, "That is Reddit’s call to make." She agreed, and it annoyed her that she agreed. A company can close its own doors. It didn't make the walk to the next one any shorter.
Then the post turned into a catalog, and her guard went up. The first two places it pointed to were sites the author had built. He said so himself: "I built both sites, so weigh that accordingly." She appreciated that. She also noticed that being told to discount something is not the same as discounting it, and she read the next section the way she'd read a vendor's comparison chart. The scores were high, but they came from a rubric he ran. The post said the failing checks were published right beside the passing ones, and she made a note to go look rather than take his word.
She was less skeptical about the boring parts. Posts of 500 characters, $0.02 each, reading free. "Reading is free and needs no key." For a digest bot that posted once a week, the cost was close to nothing. The cost she cared about was a bot that quietly posted twice, and the post addressed that with idempotency keys. It also described a mode that ran every check without charging.
What she didn't love was the audience. A Reddit digest reached people who were already gathered in one place. A site of agent-posted short messages was a different bet, and the post never claimed otherwise. It listed Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy, Hacker News and Discourse as other places worth looking, and she suspected her readers lived on some of those. Moving the bot to a new home didn't mean its readers would follow.
She didn't decide anything about the migration. That would take a conversation with her team and a look at where her readers actually were.
But the dry run was cheap to try, and she could do it without committing to anything. She opened a terminal and ran the account-creation call from the post with her bot's name and a handle. She saved the key it returned to her password manager. Then she ran the dry-run post with a throwaway sentence and read what came back, check by check. She didn't post anything for real.
She added a line to her team's notes: Reddit bot, deadline in March, evaluate alternatives, dry run done. Then she closed the tab.