Reddit Thread & Comment Scraper

Scrape Reddit posts, comments, and subreddit data at scale using Reddit's public JSON API. No API keys or authentication required.

What does it do?

This actor extracts structured data from any public subreddit, including:

• Post data: title, score, author, comment count, flair, URL, self-text, creation date
• Comment threads: author, body, score, depth, creation date
• Sorting: hot, new, top (with time filters), rising
• Search: filter posts by keyword within any subreddit
• Pagination: automatically follows Reddit's pagination to collect large datasets

Use Cases

Market Research

Analyze what people are discussing in your industry. Track trending topics, pain points, and product feedback across relevant subreddits.

Sentiment Analysis

Collect posts and comments about your brand, product, or competitors. Feed the structured data into NLP pipelines for sentiment scoring.

Brand Monitoring

Monitor mentions of your brand or product keywords. Track sentiment shifts over time by scraping regularly.

Competitive Intelligence

See what users say about competing products. Identify feature gaps, complaints, and switching triggers.

Content Research

Find trending topics and popular content formats in your niche. Analyze what gets high engagement.

Academic Research

Collect large-scale social media datasets for research purposes with structured, clean output.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
subreddit	string	programming	Subreddit name (without r/ prefix)
searchQuery	string	-	Optional keyword search within the subreddit
sort	enum	hot	Sort order: hot, new, top, rising
timeFilter	enum	week	Time range for top/search: hour, day, week, month, year, all
maxPosts	integer	50	Maximum posts to scrape (1-1000)
includeComments	boolean	false	Whether to fetch comments for each post
maxCommentsPerPost	integer	10	Max comments per post (1-500)
proxy	object	-	Optional proxy configuration

Example Input

{
  "subreddit": "machinelearning",
  "sort": "top",
  "timeFilter": "month",
  "maxPosts": 100,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 20
}

Search Example

{
  "subreddit": "webdev",
  "searchQuery": "React vs Vue",
  "sort": "top",
  "timeFilter": "year",
  "maxPosts": 50,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 15
}

Output

Each post is saved as a structured JSON object:

{
  "title": "GPT-5 just dropped and it's incredible",
  "score": 4523,
  "upvoteRatio": 0.94,
  "numComments": 892,
  "author": "ai_researcher_42",
  "subreddit": "machinelearning",
  "url": "https://openai.com/blog/gpt-5",
  "selfText": "",
  "permalink": "/r/machinelearning/comments/abc123/gpt5_just_dropped/",
  "fullUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning/comments/abc123/gpt5_just_dropped/",
  "createdAt": "2026-02-15T14:32:00.000Z",
  "createdUtc": 1771339920,
  "flair": "Discussion",
  "isNSFW": false,
  "isSelf": false,
  "domain": "openai.com",
  "postId": "abc123",
  "comments": [
    {
      "author": "deep_learning_fan",
      "body": "The reasoning capabilities are genuinely impressive...",
      "score": 1205,
      "createdAt": "2026-02-15T14:45:00.000Z",
      "createdUtc": 1771340700,
      "depth": 0
    },
    {
      "author": "skeptical_dev",
      "body": "Has anyone actually benchmarked this vs Claude?",
      "score": 834,
      "createdAt": "2026-02-15T15:02:00.000Z",
      "createdUtc": 1771341720,
      "depth": 1
    }
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-02-28T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Rate Limiting

This actor respects Reddit's rate limits:

• ~60 requests per minute without authentication
• Automatic delays between requests (1-2 seconds)
• Exponential backoff on 429 (Too Many Requests) responses
• Proxy support for higher throughput on large scrapes

Pay Per Event Pricing

This actor uses Apify's Pay Per Event model. You are charged per post scraped:

Event	Price
Post scraped (without comments)	$0.001
Post scraped (with comments)	$0.003

Limitations

• Only public subreddits can be scraped
• Reddit's JSON API returns a maximum of ~1000 posts per listing
• Comments are limited to what Reddit returns in the default comment sort (best)
• Very large comment threads may be truncated by Reddit's API
• Rate limiting may slow down large scrapes (use proxy for best results)

Changelog

1.0.0 (2026-02-28)

• Initial release
• Subreddit post scraping with sort and time filters
• Comment extraction with depth tracking
• Search within subreddits
• Pagination support
• Rate limiting with exponential backoff
• Pay Per Event billing