Reddit delivered strong earnings, but the numbers beneath the surface tell a different story. Slowing logged-in user growth and AI-powered search could threaten the platform's long-term value.
So the idea is that you capture everything in the subreddit (posts, comments, votes if they’re not delayed to the point of uselessness) and save it to a database. The API rate limit is low these days but not so low you can’t do this for a moderately sized sub in the space of a minute or so. It’s easy enough to write a script that does this capturing, and after every capture you compare it with the previous one. The difference or ‘diff’ between the two captures is the content which was added and removed between the captures. Take the removed content, subtract those deleted by the user, subtract those openly removed by the mods, and you get the silently removed content minus API errors, reddit’s own anti-spam and so on. This is often quite revealing!
Obviously this is not a perfect method, reddit itself really hates people trying to impose transparency on its platform. It has long falsely reported votes, totals, and all sorts of information while particularly shower-dodging mods will deploy their own bots on top of reddit’s own which can well beat your bot to the punch. This adds error to the process, but you can definitely see trends this way in my opinion.
So the idea is that you capture everything in the subreddit (posts, comments, votes if they’re not delayed to the point of uselessness) and save it to a database. The API rate limit is low these days but not so low you can’t do this for a moderately sized sub in the space of a minute or so. It’s easy enough to write a script that does this capturing, and after every capture you compare it with the previous one. The difference or ‘diff’ between the two captures is the content which was added and removed between the captures. Take the removed content, subtract those deleted by the user, subtract those openly removed by the mods, and you get the silently removed content minus API errors, reddit’s own anti-spam and so on. This is often quite revealing!
Obviously this is not a perfect method, reddit itself really hates people trying to impose transparency on its platform. It has long falsely reported votes, totals, and all sorts of information while particularly shower-dodging mods will deploy their own bots on top of reddit’s own which can well beat your bot to the punch. This adds error to the process, but you can definitely see trends this way in my opinion.