Read Reddit

Target: $ARGUMENTS

Reddit blocks anonymous requests and WebFetch. Every request here sends the logged-in cookie from lambda/scripts/reddit_cookie.txt and a desktop Chrome User-Agent. Without both, Reddit returns 403 or an HTML page.

A single post with its comments

Use lambda/scripts/fetch_reddit.ts. It appends .json to the URL and prints the post and the full comment tree as Markdown.

REDDIT_COOKIE="$(cat lambda/scripts/reddit_cookie.txt)" npm run r lambda/scripts/fetch_reddit.ts "<post-url>" 2>/dev/null

• Pass the post permalink: https://www.reddit.com/r/<sub>/comments/<id>/<slug>/. Share links (/s/<code>) and redd.it/<id> must be resolved first: curl -sLI -o /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' "<url>".
• Strip query strings (?utm_source=...) from the URL before passing it. The script appends .json to the end of the string.
• 2>/dev/null hides the ts-node punycode warning. Drop it when the output is empty, to see the Failed: <status> line.
• The script only handles post URLs. A subreddit or search URL prints nothing.
• Long threads: pipe through head -n 300 first, then read more if needed.

Subreddit listings and search

The script does not handle listings. Call the JSON API with curl and the same headers:

UA="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/149.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
reddit() { curl -s -A "$UA" -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Cookie: $(cat lambda/scripts/reddit_cookie.txt)" "$1"; }
LIST='.data.children[].data | "\(.created_utc | todate | .[:10])  \(.score)↑ \(.num_comments)c  r/\(.subreddit)  \(.title)\n    https://www.reddit.com\(.permalink)"'

reddit "https://www.reddit.com/r/liftosaur/new.json?limit=25" | jq -r "$LIST"
reddit "https://www.reddit.com/r/liftosaur/top.json?t=month&limit=25" | jq -r "$LIST"
reddit "https://www.reddit.com/search.json?q=liftosaur&sort=new&limit=25" | jq -r "$LIST"
reddit "https://www.reddit.com/r/fitness/search.json?q=liftosaur&restrict_sr=1&sort=new&limit=25" | jq -r "$LIST"

• Sort options: new, hot, top (with t=day|week|month|year|all), relevance and comments for search.
• Paging: take .data.after from the response and pass &after=<value>. The maximum limit is 100.
• A user's posts and comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/<name>/submitted.json and /comments.json. Comments have .body and .link_permalink in place of .title and .permalink.
• To read a thread from a listing, pass its permalink to fetch_reddit.ts.

When requests fail

• 403, or HTML where JSON was expected: the cookie expired. Ask Anton to paste a fresh Cookie header from a logged-in reddit.com tab (DevTools → Network → any reddit.com request → Request Headers → cookie) into lambda/scripts/reddit_cookie.txt.
• 429: rate limited. Wait a minute and make fewer requests. Never loop over many threads in parallel.
• 404: the post was deleted, or the subreddit is private or banned.

Rules

• Read only. Never post, vote, comment, or send messages with this cookie. It is Anton's personal account.
• Never print the cookie value into the chat or into any file other than reddit_cookie.txt.
• When summarizing a thread, quote users by u/<name> and link the permalink, so Anton can open the source.