The Commons Is Closing

Something quiet and important happened this week.

Two of the internet's most open institutions pulled up the drawbridge.

Both for the same reason.

First, Reddit.

Reddit just killed its RSS feeds and ended public API access.

Their own words... RSS had become "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse."

Translation: AI bots were hoovering up the site, and Reddit decided the open door cost more than it was worth.

Apps and bots now get funnelled onto a controlled developer platform.

Old Reddit got restricted too.

Now the second one, and it's the one that genuinely stopped me.

arXiv.

If you don't know it, arXiv is where scientists have shared research papers freely since 1991.

It's the open backbone of modern science. Physics, math, AI itself. All of it lives there first.

This week arXiv capped every researcher at two submissions a month.

Why?

September saw 40,363 papers submitted.

Two years ago, the same month saw 20,569.

The number nearly doubled, and arXiv says AI access is what fuelled it.

So the repository that made AI research possible is now rate-limiting humans...

Because AI made it too easy to flood.

Read those two stories together.

The open web that trained every model you use was built on a simple deal.

Share freely, and the commons gets richer for everyone.

AI broke the deal.

It consumes faster than any human community can contribute, and it produces faster than any gatekeeper can review.

So the gatekeepers are closing the gates.

Reddit was de-cited by ChatGPT last month, then walled off its data this month.

arXiv got buried in AI-assisted submissions, then capped the humans.

That's the pattern, and it's going to repeat everywhere.

Here's what it means for YOU.

If you built anything on free, open feeds, RSS, public APIs, scrapeable sites...

Assume it has an expiry date now.

The host sees your automation as the same thing as the abuse, because from their side it looks identical.

Which brings us back to the only durable position.

Own the relationship, not the feed.

An email list can't be rate-limited by a third party.

A community you run can't revoke your API key.

The open internet is becoming a gated one.

Make sure you're holding a key to something. 🫡

RSS, the feed format Reddit just killed, was co-written in 2000 by a 14-year-old named Aaron Swartz...

Swartz went on to help build Reddit itself in its earliest days.

Twenty-six years later, the site he helped create killed the format he helped invent.

Both of them, casualties of the bots. 📡

Science just rate-limited its own scientists.

I want to stay on arXiv a minute longer, because it's bigger than one website's rules.

Two papers a month, per person.

For a lot of serious researchers, that's a real constraint.

Active labs publish constantly. Collaborations put one name on dozens of papers a year.

And the cap exists because the firehose got out of control.

Here's the mechanism, and you'll recognise it.

AI didn't just help researchers write faster.

It made it trivially cheap to produce a plausible-looking paper.

Not a good one. A plausible one.

Formatting, citations, abstracts, all generated in minutes.

And when producing something costs nothing, the volume explodes and the signal drowns.

The reviewers can't keep up. The readers can't find the real work. The system that depends on human judgment gets overwhelmed by machine output.

So the gatekeeper does the only thing it can.

It throttles everyone, including the honest ones.

You've seen this exact dynamic in your own inbox, your own feeds, your own industry.

AI slop floods the channel, and the cost lands on the people doing real work.

So here's the takeaway, and it's not "AI bad."

It's that in a world where producing is free, FILTERING is the scarce skill.

The person who can tell the real paper from the plausible one.

The real insight from the generated noise.

The signal from the slop.

That's the job now, in science, in marketing, in everything.

Volume is free.

Judgment is the whole game. 🫡

Go count what you rely on that someone else can switch off...

And go hold a key to something of your own this weekend. 🔥

Jeff J. Hunter

Founder, AI Persona Method | TheTip.ai

Get paid to solve problems like this → AI Certified Consultant

PS. What a week... DevDay, the Pro plan halved, Gemini 4 to a room nobody's in, and AI's godfather calling Anthropic's CEO crazy. If you kept up with all that, it's because you didn't have to. That's the whole point of this email. 😏

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