Reddit Scraper

Turn a plain-language Reddit request into one run of harshmaur/reddit-scraper and hand back structured posts, comments, users or communities. One Actor covers search, subreddit listings, permalinks, user profiles and community metadata, so routing is about picking the right input field, not the right Actor.

Disclosure: the Actor this skill routes to is paid (pay per result) and built by the skill author. Links carry no affiliate parameters.

When to Use

• The user wants Reddit posts, comments, subreddits or user profiles as structured data.
• The user wants to monitor a brand, product or competitor on Reddit, or track mentions since a date.
• The user wants every comment from a thread, or the newest posts from one or more subreddits.
• The user lost access to the Reddit API or Reddit RSS feeds and needs the same data without an API key.

Example prompts

Prompts this skill handles:

• "Find every Reddit post from the last 30 days where someone asks for a Notion alternative, and pull the comments."
• "Scrape the newest 200 posts in r/SaaS and r/startups."
• "Give me all comments on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/abc123/..."
• "Track mentions of Linear and Jira on Reddit since 2026-08-01 and send each hit to my Slack channel."
• "What has u/spez posted recently?"

Out of scope (the boundary):

• "Post a reply in r/startups" — this Actor only reads Reddit. Use the Reddit API with the user's own account.
• "Find Reddit threads about the pain of managing invoices" — Reddit search is literal keyword matching, not semantic. Expand the topic into 3–8 short literal keywords first (see Step 1), then run one search per keyword.

Prerequisites

• Apify account (sign up); the free plan covers small runs.
• Authentication via one of:
  • apify login (OAuth, if using the Apify CLI)
  • APIFY_TOKEN environment variable
  • Token from Apify Console → Settings → Integrations
• Apify CLI (npm install -g apify-cli), or the Apify MCP server (see "Calling the Actor").

Workflow

Step 1 — Classify the request and pick input fields

User gives you	Field to use	Notes
Keywords, a brand, a product, a phrase	searchTerms (array)	One search per term, each with its own maxPostsCount. Keep terms short and literal ("notion alternative", not a sentence). Free plans search the first 40 terms per run.
Keywords + "only in r/X"	searchTerms + withinCommunity	Accepts developers, r/developers or the full subreddit URL.
A subreddit to scrape in bulk	subredditUrls (array of names or community URLs)	Fetches far more posts than a plain listing. Never put post permalinks here — they are dropped silently and the run finishes with 0 items.
Post, user-profile, subreddit or search-page URLs	startUrls (array of { "url": ... })	Search options (sort/time/community) do NOT apply to these. /s/ share links work too; the Actor resolves them.
"since <date>" / "between <dates>" / "last month" / "past week"	postedAfter, postedBefore (YYYY-MM-DD)	Relative periods too: "last month" → postedAfter = today − 1 month. Also commentedAfter / commentedBefore for comments. Results are fetched newest-first and stop early once older than the window; searchSort and searchTime are ignored while a date is set.
"with comments" / "full thread"	crawlCommentsPerPost: true + maxCommentsPerPost	Multiplies result count and cost — see gotchas.
"comments that mention X"	searchComments: true, searchPosts: false	Comment search across Reddit.
"which subreddits are about X"	searchCommunities: true	Returns dataType: "community" rows.
"send to Slack / Notion / Sheets"	mcpConnector + mcpTarget (+ mcpMessage)	Requires an authorized MCP connector in the user's Apify account; see references/input-mapping.md.

When the user's phrase is descriptive rather than literal ("people frustrated with their CRM"), draft 3–8 literal keywords ("CRM sucks", "switching from HubSpot", "CRM recommendation"), put them in the run section of your answer (Step 3), and run them as searchTerms.

Step 2 — Build the input

Start from these defaults and change only what the request needs:

{
  "searchTerms": ["notion alternative"],
  "searchPosts": true,
  "searchComments": false,
  "searchCommunities": false,
  "searchSort": "new",
  "searchTime": "month",
  "maxPostsCount": 50,
  "crawlCommentsPerPost": false,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 50,
  "includeNSFW": false
}

• searchSort: new for monitoring, relevance for precise matching, top / hot for what performed, comments for the most discussed.
• searchTime: hour | day | week | month | year | all. When the user names a period — a date or a relative one like "last month", "past week" — you have two options, and you must pick one