YouTube Community Post & Poll Scraper

Scrape the YouTube tab that every video-metric scraper ignores.

Give it channel handles. It returns each community post's full text, like count, publish time, outbound links, attached images, attached videos, and poll questions with their options and total votes.

This is audience-research material no other YouTube endpoint carries: what a creator asks their audience, what they promote between uploads, and which posts land.

No login, no cookies, no API key.

What you get

{
  "channelHandle": "@veritasium",
  "feedPosition": 1,
  "postId": "UgkxtIWAwjGL7mY_dtJC9fQX",
  "text": "Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, releases files exposing that New Yorkers were lied to about the quality of the air after the September 11th attacks…",
  "likeCountText": "1.3K",
  "likeCountApprox": 1300,
  "publishedTimeText": "8 days ago",
  "isEdited": false,
  "links": ["https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/"],
  "attachmentType": "video",
  "video": {
    "videoId": "cMx139eTxoc",
    "title": "What does asbestos do to a person?",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc"
  }
}

Links are unwrapped: YouTube rewrites every outbound URL in a post to youtube.com/redirect?…&q=<real url>. You get the destination, not the tracker.

Attachment types

attachmentType	What you get
multi-image	Up to 10 image URLs, highest resolution available (measured up to 5464×5464)
image	One image URL
video	videoId, title, URL, view-count text
poll	Options, total votes, poll type
none	Text-only post

Two limits, stated up front

1. Like counts are abbreviated, never exact. YouTube publishes "1.9M" and nothing more precise to a logged-out client. You get likeCountText: "1.9M" and likeCountApprox: 1900000, with likeCountIsApprox: true on every record. No Actor can give you the exact figure without being signed in.

2. Polls give the options and the total, not the split. A poll returns its exact wording and totalVotesText: "1.7M votes". The per-option percentage is shown only to a signed-in account that has voted — in the logged-out payload there is a sign-in prompt where the percentage would be. votesPerChoice is therefore null by design, with a note explaining why, rather than a fabricated number.

Post comment threads are also out of scope: they need a separate InnerTube continuation fetch.

Four outcomes, not one

A scraper that reports "0 results" for all of these is hiding information:

recordType	Meaning
POST	A parsed post
EMPTY	The page rendered fine and this channel has never posted
ERROR + community-unavailable	YouTube says the tab is off. A channel setting, not a scrape failure
REDUCED	The page never listed posts after 5 attempts — retry or use a proxy

Known limits

• 10 posts per channel. That is one page. Older posts sit behind a continuation token this Actor does not follow.
• Publish times are relative ("5 months ago"), because that is all YouTube renders.

The path that does not work

/@handle/community returns a full 761 KB page reading "This Community isn't available" with zero posts — for every channel, including ones that post constantly. It is not a per-channel setting and no consent cookie changes it. The working path is /@handle/posts. This Actor uses the latter; see CRAWLING_METHOD.md.

Input example

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channels": ["@MrBeast", "@veritasium", "@mkbhd"],
  "postsPerChannel": 10
}