Reddit Engagement

Reddit Engagement

Join conversations other people are already having, usefully. The whole skill is one loop — discover, read, judge, draft, approve, publish, verify — and the hardest step is the judging, not the writing.

When to use

The user wants to participate in Reddit threads the brand did not start. One pass produces a small number of replies (two or three is a good outing), each to a different thread, each adding something specific.

Tools this skill uses

Prerequisites

• workspace_id — resolve once via list-workspaces. Auth is automatic through the Bolta connector's OAuth grant; never ask for an API key.
• A connected Reddit account. If none exists, use get-connect-link with platform="reddit" and stop — you cannot engage without an identity.
• Publishing a reply needs an owner/admin/creator role. If a call returns a permission error, run get-my-capabilities, say which role is missing, and do not retry.

Workflow

1. Resolve workspace and account

list-workspaces → list-accounts(workspace_id). Pick the Reddit account. If there are several, ask which identity to speak as — this is a public reply under somebody's username.

2. Confirm the capability

list-engagement-capabilities(workspace_id, platform="reddit"). Check discover, reply_to_post and reply_to_comment for the chosen account. An account whose credentials need reconnecting is reported with its capabilities downgraded — say so and stop rather than failing later at publish time.

3. Load the voice

get-voice-context(workspace_id). You need this to judge relevance, not to write: the reply text is generated server-side. What you are looking for is what the brand actually does, who it is for, and what it would never say.

get-voice-context already returns the resolved Business DNA context, so it is usually enough on its own. If you need the deeper DNA record, take the id from its provenance — or call list-business-dna — and then get-business-dna(dna_id). get-business-dna requires a dna_id; there is no workspace-wide form of it.

4. Check what has already been done

list-engagements(workspace_id, platform="reddit"). Replying twice to the same thread, or re-engaging a thread from last week's run, is the most visible way to look automated.

5. Search

search-engagement-opportunities(workspace_id, account_id, platform="reddit", query=..., subreddit=..., sort="new", time_filter="week").

Search one term at a time, and use terms people would actually type. Derive them from the voice context and the user's ask, not from product marketing language. campaign_id is optional — omit it unless the user is working inside a specific Hunter campaign.

6. Read before judging

For each candidate that looks plausible, get-engagement-conversation(..., target_id=..., comment_limit=20). Read the submission AND the comments. This is not optional: most of the value of this skill is in the threads you skip, and you cannot skip well from a title.

7. Judge — this is the actual work

Skip the thread when:

• you have nothing specific to add beyond agreement;
• the question is already answered well in the comments;
• the only thing you could say is a version of the product pitch;
• it is a rant, a poll, a meme, or a support request for somebody else's tool;
• it is old enough that a new comment reads as thread necromancy;
• the subreddit's rules or culture clearly do not welcome a brand account.

Two good replies and an explanation of why you passed on the rest is a successful run. Padding to a number with weak replies is a failed one. Tell the user what you skipped and why — that judgement is the thing they are trusting you with.

8. Draft

draft-engagement-reply(workspace_id, opportunity_id, account_id).

You are not writing the reply. Bolta's outbound engagement writer produces it server-side and already enforces the brand voice, Reddit's conventions, and the rules that matter here — no summarizing the OP, no generic praise opener, one specific contribution, participant not commentator, no forced slang, no thought-leadership cadence, and no brand mention unless the context genuinely calls for one. Your job is picking the right target and giving the writer the conversation.

Calling it twice for the same opportunity returns the existing draft rather than producing a second one.

9. Check the draft before showing it

Read what came back and sanity-check it against the same bar:

• Does it add something, or does it restate the post?
• Is it short — usually under 80 words for Reddit?
• Does it mention the brand for no reason? (It should not.)
• Would it read as a person in that subreddit, or as a company?

If it fails, say so plainly and offer to redraft with a different angle, or drop the thread. Do not silently publish a reply you would not have written.

10. Approve

Show the user the reply and the thread it is going into, with the permalink. Wait for an explicit go-ahead. A Reddit comment is public and attached to a real username; this is not a step to infer consent for.

If they want a change, pass the edited text as content to publish-engagement-reply — one call edits and sends.

11. Publish

publish-engagement-reply(workspace_id, engagement_id, content?). Idempotent by construction: one reply per target, so a retry after a network failure returns the original rather than double-posting.

12. Verify

get-engagement-status(workspace_id, engagement_id). Not done until this returns a real canonical URL or an explicit pending/failed state. Report the URL to the user. A reply you cannot link to has not been verified, whatever the publish call returned.

Definition of done

• Every thread you engaged has a canonical Reddit URL reported back.
• Every thread you skipped has a one-line reason.
• Nothing was published without an explicit approval.
• No thread received two replies.

Failure handling

• unsupported_platform on search → discovery is not available; stop, do not retry with different parameters.
• account_missing → no Reddit account attached; get-connect-link and stop.
• credentials_expired → the account needs reconnecting. Say so; do not retry.
• target_not_found / target_deleted → the submission went away between discovery and drafting. Drop it and move on; this is normal.
• invalid_subreddit → the campaign has no configured subreddits and none was given. Ask the user which subreddit.
• Permission error on publish → get-my-capabilities, report the missing role, do not retry.
• Rate limiting → report it and stop. Reddit rate limits are per-account and waiting is the only fix.

Save this as a routine

When the user wants this to keep happening — "do this every weekday morning" — do not build an agent. Create a routine:

1. list-routine-templates() → find reddit_engagement.
2. create-routine(template_key="reddit_engagement", name=..., goal=<the user's own words>, trigger_type="schedule", schedule={"cron": "0 10 * * 1-5"}, timezone=<their zone>, instructions=<their steer>, source_bindings=[{provider: "social_account", ref: <reddit account id>}], output_config={artifact_type: "reply", count: 3, topics: [...], communities: [...]}).
3. activate-routine(routine_id) — it is a draft until you do.

Notes:

• The schedule vocabulary is daily / weekly / monthly plus cron. "Weekdays at 10am" is {"cron": "0 10 * * 1-5"}.
• Times are wall-clock in the routine's timezone. Never send a UTC offset and never convert the user's stated time yourself.
• approval_policy defaults to review_every_artifact and this template does not allow auto. Every scheduled reply waits for a human. Say that out loud — it is the reassurance the user actually wants.
• Scheduled runs draft only; the drafts land in the review queue (list-inbox-items) and are published from there.