Reddit Scraper Pro

Scrapes Reddit posts, comments, communities and user profiles using Reddit's official API — using free, no-cost OAuth credentials instead of scraping anonymous .json endpoints, which Reddit blocks aggressively from shared/datacenter IPs (including Apify's free-tier infrastructure).

Important: get free Reddit API credentials (2 minutes, fixes 403 blocks)

Without credentials, this actor falls back to anonymous requests to www.reddit.com/*.json, which will get blocked with 403 errors on Apify's free plan, since you have no proxy and Reddit blocks shared datacenter IPs on sight. This isn't a bug in the actor — it's how Reddit treats all anonymous scraper traffic from common cloud IP ranges.

The fix is free and takes about 2 minutes:

1. Go to https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps
2. Click "create app" (or "create another app") at the bottom
3. Fill in:
   • name: anything, e.g. "my-scraper"
   • type: select script
   • redirect uri: http://localhost:8080 (required field, not actually used)
4. Click create app
5. You'll see two values:
   • Client ID — the string under the app name (looks like Ax3kf9_LplmnO)
   • Client Secret — labeled "secret"
6. Paste both into this actor's input fields: redditClientId and redditClientSecret

That's it — once these are set, the actor authenticates with Reddit's official API (oauth.reddit.com) instead of scraping the public site, and the 403 blocks go away completely. This is also free for normal scraping volumes (Reddit's API rate limit is generous for a single script app).

What's new compared to standard Reddit scrapers

1. Keyword search / brand monitoring mode

Instead of only scraping URLs you already have, give it keywords and it searches Reddit (or a specific subreddit) for matching posts. Useful for:

• Brand or product mention monitoring
• Market research ("what are people saying about X")
• Lead generation (find people asking for recommendations in your niche)

2. Built-in sentiment analysis

Every post and comment gets scored as positive, negative, or neutral using lexicon-based sentiment scoring — no external API, no cost, runs entirely inside the actor. Useful for quickly spotting community sentiment shifts without reading every comment.

3. Trend velocity score

Calculates upvotes per hour for each post — this surfaces content that's rapidly gaining traction right now, not just old posts that accumulated a high score over time. Much better signal for "what's happening right now" than raw score alone.

What it scrapes

Record type	Fields
post	title, author, subreddit, selftext, score, upvote_ratio, num_comments, sentiment, trend score, media
comment	body, author, score, depth, sentiment
user	karma breakdown, account age, mod/gold status
community	subscriber count, active users, description

Input example

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/shopify/"],
  "searchKeywords": [
    { "keyword": "best shopify app for", "subreddit": "shopify" }
  ],
  "sortBy": "top",
  "timeframe": "week",
  "maxPostsPerSource": 50,
  "enableSentiment": true,
  "enableTrendScore": true
}

Notes

• No login, no cookies, no API key — uses Reddit's public JSON API
• Respect Reddit's rate limits; the actor uses moderate concurrency by default
• Sentiment analysis is lexicon-based (fast, free, no API calls) — not as nuanced as an LLM, but useful for quick directional signal at scale