Reddit Research

Reddit research

Look up subreddit posts and comments, a single post's full comment thread, keyword search results, a public user's post/comment history, and hot/new/rising/top trends — all as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API, no Reddit scraping or unofficial client libraries.

When to use this skill

• "What's talking about right now?"
• "Pull the comments on this Reddit post/thread."
• "Search Reddit for posts about <topic/product/brand>."
• "What has posted or commented recently?"
• "What's trending on Reddit today?" or "What's the sentiment in r/?"
• Brand-mention monitoring, community research, or competitor sentiment tracking on Reddit.

Setup (one-time)

• Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
• Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
• The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

1. Search — /reddit/search for keyword-matched posts, optionally scoped to a subreddit.
2. One post + its thread — /reddit/post/{id} for the post itself, /reddit/comments/{id} for its public comments (add include_metrics=true on either for net score/upvote-ratio/award data at 3 credits instead of 1).
3. Browse a subreddit — /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/posts (hot/new/ top/rising), /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/comments (latest flat comments feed), and /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/about for metadata + sample posts.
4. Multi-subreddit feed — /reddit/subreddits/posts with a comma-separated subreddits list (max 10) for a combined hot/new/top feed.
5. User history — /reddit/user/{username}/posts and /reddit/user/{username}/comments for a public user's submitted/comment feeds.
6. Domain mentions — /reddit/domain/{domain}/posts for public posts linking to a given hostname.
7. Trends — /reddit/trends for broad hot/new/rising/top feeds; for a single subreddit's trend, use /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/posts with sort=hot|new|rising|top instead.

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Search + subreddit browse:
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/search q="web scraping" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/subreddit/programming/posts sort=top time=week | jq '.'

# Post + comment thread:
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/post/1abcxyz include_metrics=true | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/comments/1abcxyz sort=top limit=50 | jq '.'

# User history + trends:
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/user/spez/posts | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /reddit/trends sort=rising | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for all Reddit endpoints this skill uses.

Examples

• Community sentiment research: /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/posts + /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/comments for a topic-relevant subreddit, scan post titles and comment text for recurring sentiment/pain points.
• Thread deep-dive: /reddit/post/{id} for the original post plus /reddit/comments/{id}?include_metrics=true for the full discussion with net score and award counts, to summarize a viral thread.
• Brand-mention sweep: /reddit/search q="<brand>" across all of Reddit or scoped with subreddit=, paginated via the returned after token, to count and read every public mention.

Notes & limits

• Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
• Public data only — public posts/comments/subreddits; no login, no private content. Respect Reddit's terms.
• Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
• Anonymous-page limits: subscriber counts, icons, and banners are omitted from /reddit/subreddit/{subreddit}/about (not available on anonymous Reddit pages); exact upvote/downvote totals, upvote ratios, and share/repost/ view counts are estimated or unavailable without include_metrics=true, and even then Reddit fuzzes voting data so figures are approximate.
• Metrics cost more: include_metrics=true on /reddit/post/{id} or /reddit/comments/{id} switches to the anonymous HTML page and costs 3 credits instead of 1; large comment threads may only expose an initial subset in that mode.
• Throttling: most list endpoints return 503 with a Retry-After header when Reddit is temporarily throttling the request — wait that many seconds and retry rather than treating it as a hard failure.
• List endpoints are cursor-paginated via after — follow the returned cursor to walk beyond the first page (defaults to 25 results, clamps to 100).