Reddit Feed Scraper

Collect posts from Reddit's front-page feeds -- Home, Popular, Games or News. Pick the feed at run time, set a sort, and the Actor pages through it.

Good for tracking what surfaces over time: run it on a schedule and diff the results.

Input

Field	Use it for
feed_type	home (default), popular, games or news.
sort	BEST (default), HOT, NEW, TOP or RISING.
maxItems	Caps the run. Default 100. Set 0 for no limit.

{
  "feed_type": "popular",
  "sort": "HOT",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

One row per post, identical across all four feeds.

Field	Contents
post_id	Reddit post fullname
title	Post title
author	Username
subreddit	Which community it came from
created_at	Creation timestamp
score	Net score
num_comments	Comment count

{
  "post_id": "t3_1v03k9x",
  "title": "Scientists confirm the thing everyone suspected",
  "author": "lab_notes",
  "subreddit": "science",
  "created_at": "2026-07-20T14:31:07.000Z",
  "score": 28104,
  "num_comments": 1502
}

Reddit returns these four feeds in two different internal shapes -- home and popular one way, games and news another. Both are normalised to the columns above, so you can switch feed_type without touching whatever consumes the dataset.

home is not your home feed

Worth being clear about, because the name suggests otherwise.

There is no login and no session here, so home is Reddit's default anonymous front page -- the same thing a logged-out visitor sees. It is not personalised, it does not reflect your subscriptions, and it will not match what you see in your own browser.

If you want the broadly popular content, popular is the more honest choice for that intent. games and news are Reddit's own topic feeds.

Questions

Which sort actually changes anything? All five are accepted on every feed. NEW is the one to use if you are diffing runs, because it is the only ordering that is stable minute to minute. BEST, HOT, TOP and RISING are all re-ranked continuously, so consecutive runs return overlapping sets in different orders.

Why did I get fewer posts than maxItems? Front-page feeds are short. Reddit stops issuing cursors after a few hundred posts, and the run ends when there is no next cursor, the page is empty, or the same cursor repeats. maxItems: 0 on a front-page feed is not an unbounded crawl -- it typically ends in the low hundreds.

Can I get the whole of r/popular history? No. These are live feeds with no archive behind them. For a community's history, use the Subreddit Posts Scraper against a specific subreddit.

How do I turn a row into full post detail? Collect the post_id column and pass it to the Post Scraper as a comma-separated list -- it batches, so a whole feed's worth of IDs costs far less than fetching them one by one.

Related Actors

Actor	Purpose
Reddit Post Scraper	Full detail on feed posts, batched
Reddit Subreddit Posts Scraper	One community in depth instead of the front page
Reddit Search Scraper	Keyword search across Reddit