Reddit

Introduction

The YouTube API provides access to video and channel discovery, detailed metadata, comments, and transcript data. In this guide, we'll demonstrate a complete workflow for finding and analyzing recent news content by searching for videos about a breaking news story, getting comprehensive details, and accessing the full transcript for content analysis.

• Base URL: https://api.webit.live/api/v1/realtime/social/reddit/v1

Billing: Reddit API requests are billed using the VX12 driver.

Key Endpoints

• Discover: The Discover endpoints let you search across Reddit for posts, subreddits, users, and comments using free-text queries and pagination. They provide high-level discovery capabilities to identify trends, communities, creators, and conversations before diving into deeper analysis.

• Subreddit: The Subreddit endpoints give you complete access to subreddit-level data including metadata, rules, moderators, wiki pages, and posts. They are ideal for understanding a community’s structure and exploring its content in a focused, contextual way.

• Posts: The Posts endpoints allow you to retrieve detailed post information by ID and fetch full discussion trees with nested comments. They support deep content analysis, engagement research, and conversational mapping for any Reddit post.

• User: The User endpoints provide detailed user profiles, posts, comments, and their most active subreddits. They are designed to analyze user behavior, content patterns, influence, and community participation.

• Comments: The Comments endpoints let you fetch individual comments by ID along with their parent post context. They are useful for precise comment-level retrieval, sentiment analysis, and reconstructing discussions.

FAQ

How do I use pagination with cursors?

Reddit API endpoints that return large result sets use cursor-based pagination. The response includes:

• cursor - Use this value to fetch the next page of results or to navigate deeper into nested comment threads

• hasNextPage - Boolean indicating whether additional pages are available

For paginated results, include the cursor value from your previous response in your next request. When hasNextPage is false, you've reached the end of the results.

For comment threads, the cursor allows you to drill down into nested replies at specific depths and branches within the discussion tree.

What is the maximum query length for search endpoints?

Search queries can be up to 256 URL-encoded characters, including operators, keywords, and special characters.

What search operators are available?

Boolean Operators and Grouping

Operator	Description	Example
AND logic	Use AND between terms to require all connected words.	technology AND innovation
OR logic	Use OR between terms. Any of the terms can appear in results.	machine OR artificial
NOT logic	Use NOT to exclude terms. Cannot be used alone.	python NOT snake
Grouping	Use parentheses to group conditions.	(machine OR artificial) AND intelligence

Search by Author and Subreddit

Filter	Description	Example
author:	Posts by specific user. No space after colon.	author:reddit
subreddit:	Posts in specific subreddit. No space after colon.	subreddit:technology
self:	Filter by post type. Use true for text posts only, false for link posts only.	self:true

Search by Content

Filter	Description	Example
url:	Posts linking to specific URL.	url:example.com
site:	Posts from specific domain.	site:github.com
selftext:	Search within post body text.	selftext:tutorial or selftext:"step by step"
title:	Search within post titles only.	title:announcement or title:"security update"
flair:	Posts with specific flair.	flair:discussion

Note: When searching for multiple words within a field, wrap the query in double or single quotes.

Why don't my search results match my query exactly?

Reddit uses fuzzy search by default, which means results may not contain all your search terms exactly as written.

For post searches, Reddit requires some but not necessarily all words in your query to match. For comment and people searches, all words in your query must currently match, though this behavior may change in the future.

What's the difference between best, hot, and top sorting?

Best sorts by upvote-to-downvote ratio, favoring content with higher approval percentages. When ratios are similar, content with more total votes ranks higher.

Hot prioritizes recent posts with strong engagement. Newer posts can outrank older posts even if they have fewer total votes.

Top sorts by net score (upvotes minus downvotes), ignoring recency and vote ratios.

Can I search private subreddit communities?

No, Reddit API only returns data from public subreddits and posts. Private subreddit communities and their content are not accessible through the API.

Why do user posts and comments return empty results?

Users can set their content to private. When requesting posts, comments, or subreddit subscriptions from a private profile, the user info endpoint returns their profile data normally, but content endpoints return empty arrays:

JSON

{
  "type": "user",
  "pageInfo": {
    "hasNextPage": false,
    "cursor": null
  },
  "posts": []
}

The user's profile information will show their karma and contribution counts, but you won't be able to access the actual posts or comments. You'll receive the same empty structure whether requesting posts, comments, or subreddits.

What do deleted and unavailable user responses mean?

User profiles may be inaccessible for several reasons, each returning different response structures:

Deleted users return a minimal response indicating the account was deleted:

JSON

{
  "type": "deleted_user"
}

Banned users return an unavailable status:

JSON

{
  "type": "unavailable_user"
}

When encountering these responses, the user's historical content may still be visible on Reddit but their profile information is no longer accessible through the API.