Reddit Active Hours & Posting Times Analyzer

Find out when any public Reddit user is active. Enter a username and get a day-by-hour heatmap built from their posts and comments, their peak days and hours, quiet (likely-asleep) hours, and an estimate of the user's time zone — no login or API key required.

What you get

• Day-by-hour heatmap — a 7×24 grid showing how many posts and comments land in each hour of each weekday, in both the user's local time and UTC
• Most active day and hour — the single peak weekday and hour
• Quiet hours — the hours with little or no activity (the user's likely offline/sleep window)
• Estimated time zone — auto-detected from the quietest activity window, with a confidence rating (or supply your own)
• Posts vs. comments split and weekday vs. weekend split
• Top time slots — the five busiest day+hour combinations
• Export to JSON, CSV, or Google Sheets directly from the Apify console

Use cases

• Best time to post / reach — time replies, AMAs, or outreach for when the user is actually online
• Audience and community research — understand a user's or moderator's activity rhythm
• Account vetting — distinguish organic human activity from accounts that post on a flat, automated schedule
• Time-zone inference — estimate where in the world an account is based

How it works

The analyzer samples the user's most recent posts and comments (their overview feed) and buckets every timestamp by weekday and hour. Comments capture frequent, real-time activity, so the pattern is usually sharp. The time zone is inferred from the circadian dip — the multi-hour window when the user is least active (their local night) — and you can always override it.

Note: this reflects activity time, not real-time presence. Cross-posting bots and schedulers can flatten the pattern — which itself shows up as a "low confidence" time-zone estimate.

How to use

1. Enter the Reddit username (with or without u/; profile URLs work too)
2. Set Items to Analyze (default 500; more samples = a sharper pattern)
3. Optionally set a Time Zone Offset (e.g. -5, 1, 5.5) to skip auto-detection
4. Run the actor — the report appears in the Dataset tab

Output format

A single record per run:

{
  "username": "spez",
  "platform": "reddit",
  "samplesAnalyzed": 500,
  "postsAnalyzed": 73,
  "commentsAnalyzed": 427,
  "timeRange": { "earliest": "2024-05-01T...", "latest": "2024-06-03T...", "spanDays": 33 },
  "timezone": { "mode": "inferred", "offsetHours": -8, "label": "UTC-8", "confidence": "high", "note": "..." },
  "mostActiveDay": "Thursday",
  "mostActiveHour": "14:00",
  "quietHours": ["02:00", "03:00", "04:00", "05:00"],
  "weekdayShare": 0.81,
  "weekendShare": 0.19,
  "topSlots": [{ "day": "Thursday", "hour": "14:00", "count": 22, "share": 0.044 }],
  "hourHistogram": [/* 24 counts, local */],
  "dayHistogram": [/* 7 counts, Monday-first */],
  "dayNames": ["Monday", "...", "Sunday"],
  "heatmap": { "Monday": [/* 24 */], "...": [] },
  "heatmapUtc": { "Monday": [/* 24 */], "...": [] }
}

Build a visual heatmap straight from heatmap, or chart hourHistogram / dayHistogram for a quick view.