"Syntaxerror: Unexpected Token < in Json at Position 0"

In a React app component which handles Facebook-like content feeds, I am running into an error:

Feed.js:94 undefined "parsererror" "SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0

I ran into a similar error which turned out to be a typo in the HTML within the render function, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

More confusingly, I rolled the code back to an earlier, known-working version and I'm still getting the error.

Feed.js:

import React from 'react';

var ThreadForm = React.createClass({
  getInitialState: function () {
    return {author: '', 
            text: '', 
            included: '',
            victim: ''
            }
  },
  handleAuthorChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({author: e.target.value})
  },
  handleTextChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({text: e.target.value})
  },
  handleIncludedChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({included: e.target.value})
  },
  handleVictimChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({victim: e.target.value})
  },
  handleSubmit: function (e) {
    e.preventDefault()
    var author = this.state.author.trim()
    var text = this.state.text.trim()
    var included = this.state.included.trim()
    var victim = this.state.victim.trim()
    if (!text || !author || !included || !victim) {
      return
    }
    this.props.onThreadSubmit({author: author, 
                                text: text, 
                                included: included,
                                victim: victim
                              })
    this.setState({author: '', 
                  text: '', 
                  included: '',
                  victim: ''
                  })
  },
  render: function () {
    return (
    <form className="threadForm" onSubmit={this.handleSubmit}>
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Your name"
        value={this.state.author}
        onChange={this.handleAuthorChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Say something..."
        value={this.state.text}
        onChange={this.handleTextChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Name your victim"
        value={this.state.victim}
        onChange={this.handleVictimChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Who can see?"
        value={this.state.included}
        onChange={this.handleIncludedChange} />
      <input type="submit" value="Post" />
    </form>
    )
  }
})

var ThreadsBox = React.createClass({
  loadThreadsFromServer: function () {
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      cache: false,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({data: data})
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString())
      }.bind(this)
    })
  },
  handleThreadSubmit: function (thread) {
    var threads = this.state.data
    var newThreads = threads.concat([thread])
    this.setState({data: newThreads})
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      type: 'POST',
      data: thread,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({data: data})
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        this.setState({data: threads})
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString())
      }.bind(this)
    })
  },
  getInitialState: function () {
    return {data: []}
  },
  componentDidMount: function () {
    this.loadThreadsFromServer()
    setInterval(this.loadThreadsFromServer, this.props.pollInterval)
  },
  render: function () {
    return (
    <div className="threadsBox">
      <h1>Feed</h1>
      <div>
        <ThreadForm onThreadSubmit={this.handleThreadSubmit} />
      </div>
    </div>
    )
  }
})

module.exports = ThreadsBox

In Chrome developer tools, the error seems to be coming from this function:

 loadThreadsFromServer: function loadThreadsFromServer() {
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      cache: false,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({ data: data });
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString());
      }.bind(this)
    });
  },

with the line console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString() underlined.

Since it looks like the error seems to have something to do with pulling JSON data from the server, I tried starting from a blank db, but the error persists. The error seems to be called in an infinite loop presumably as React continuously tries to connect to the server and eventually crashes the browser.

EDIT:

I've checked the server response with Chrome dev tools and Chrome REST client, and the data appears to be proper JSON.

EDIT 2:

It appears that though the intended API endpoint is indeed returning the correct JSON data and format, React is polling instead of the expected .

I am running a webpack hot-reload server on port 3000 with the express app running on port 3001 to return the backend data. What's frustrating here is that this was working correctly the last time I worked on it and can't find what I could have possibly changed to break it.