Reddit Scraper

Scrape posts and comments from any subreddit. Uses Reddit's public JSON API -- no API key or login required.

What it does

This actor pulls posts from any public subreddit with full metadata: scores, authors, timestamps, flairs, and more. Optionally fetches the entire comment tree for each post with configurable depth. Supports sorting by hot/new/top/rising and searching within subreddits.

Use cases

• Market research: Track what people are saying about your product or industry on Reddit.
• Content research: Find trending topics and discussions in any niche.
• Sentiment analysis: Collect posts and comments for NLP analysis.
• Competitor monitoring: Set up scheduled runs to track mentions of competitor brands.
• Academic research: Gather discussion data for social science or linguistics studies.
• Lead generation: Find people asking for recommendations in your product category.

Input options

Parameter	Description	Default
Subreddit	Subreddit name without "r/" prefix	Required
Sort Order	hot, new, top, or rising	hot
Timeframe	Time filter for "top" sort (hour/day/week/month/year/all)	week
Search Query	Search within the subreddit	Empty (no search)
Include Comments	Also scrape comments for each post	No
Max Comment Depth	How deep to go into reply chains (1-10)	3
Max Posts	Number of posts to scrape (up to 1000)	25

Output format

Posts:

{
    "_type": "post",
    "post_id": "abc123",
    "title": "What's the best Python web framework in 2024?",
    "author": "pythondev42",
    "subreddit": "python",
    "score": 342,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.95,
    "num_comments": 89,
    "created_utc": "2024-01-15T10:30:00+00:00",
    "selftext": "I've been using Flask for years but...",
    "url": "https://reddit.com/r/python/comments/abc123/...",
    "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/python/comments/abc123/...",
    "flair": "Discussion",
    "is_self": true,
    "is_video": false,
    "domain": "self.python",
    "awards_count": 2
}

Comments (when enabled):

{
    "_type": "comment",
    "comment_id": "xyz789",
    "post_id": "abc123",
    "author": "django_fan",
    "body": "Django is still the best for larger projects...",
    "score": 156,
    "created_utc": "2024-01-15T11:45:00+00:00",
    "depth": 0,
    "parent_id": "t3_abc123",
    "is_submitter": false,
    "awards_count": 1
}

How it works

The actor appends .json to Reddit URLs to get structured data without needing the official API. It handles pagination automatically and respects Reddit's rate limits with built-in delays and retry logic.

Rate limits

Reddit rate-limits unauthenticated JSON requests. The actor handles this automatically:

• 1 second delay between post page fetches
• 1.5 second delay between comment fetches
• Automatic retry with backoff on 429 responses

For large scrapes (100+ posts with comments), runs may take several minutes.

Tips

• Start without comments to quickly scan posts, then re-run with comments for the ones you care about.
• Use the search feature to find niche discussions within large subreddits.
• Sort by "top" with timeframe "all" to get the most popular posts of all time.
• Schedule hourly runs with "new" sort to catch every post in a subreddit.