Using Reddit for product and community research
Subreddits and comment trees as a qualitative corpus. Access without API approval is a different page.
Product people already lurk on Reddit. The useful version is a feed: search a keyword, sort by comments or top, pull the tree. reddit.fetcher.sh returns that as JSON. Public text only. This is research, not a survey panel and not recruited respondents.
It is not the access story. Posts and comment trees without API approval covers that. It is not OSINT, and it is not news monitoring. App-store reviews are software ratings on another pair of hosts. When you need all three corpora, that is market research.
The distinctive move is the tree. Titles lie. Upvotes lie. The third comment is where someone says they just use the Clock app.
A corpus, not a key tutorial
Pick a subreddit or a search. Sort the way Reddit sorts. Pull posts and the discussion under them.
curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer bby_live_…' 'https://reddit.fetcher.sh/api/search/post?keyword=habit+tracker&sort=comments'
Sort by comments when you want discussion, top when you want consensus, new when you want the live argument. Pull the tree under a post before you trust a title.
Feeds on a subreddit (hot, new, top, best) are how you watch a community instead of a keyword. Keyword search is how you follow a product across many subreddits. Use both. Do not only scrape r/all in your head.
What not to mix in
OSINT is investigation. News monitoring is headlines. App-store reviews are software ratings. Maps reviews are cafes. Reddit-as-research is the community arguing in public. Keep those jobs labeled so a Maps review does not land in the spec.
A survey panel asks your questions. Reddit already asked theirs. That is cheaper and ruder, which is the point of the first pass. It is not statistically designed. Do not put “n=400 comments” on a slide as if it were n=400 respondents.
A case: “habit tracker” before you write a spec
A PM is scoping a reminder product. They do not want a survey yet. They want the arguments people already had.
They search habit tracker sorted by comments. They open the trees on the top five posts. They keep a running list: too many notifications, streak anxiety, calendar sync, “I just use the Clock app.” They do not treat upvote count as truth. They treat the caveats in the tree as the research.
That pass is cheaper than a panel and ruder than a landing-page test — which is the point. Public subreddit text as a feed, not recruited respondents. Store reviews come later if they need billing complaints. YouTube comments come later if a review video is the actual watercooler.
A case: a community that is the product
They are not building a habit tracker. They are building a tool for a subreddit’s workflow. They pull hot and new on that subreddit for a month, store post ids, and they only keyword-filter in their own code.
The research is the beat of the community, not a global search. Access without API approval still sits on the other note. This case is why feeds exist as paths separate from search.
They keep a running document of phrases the community actually uses, because those become the next search keywords. “Habit tracker” was the analyst’s phrase; “streak anxiety” was the community’s. Next week’s search uses the community’s words. That loop is the method. A single heroic search is a blog post, not a practice.
When a tree is mostly jokes, they still skim the few comments that say “I tried X instead.” Substitutes are product research. Pile-ons are mood. Label them.
A monthly research ritual that does not rot: the same keyword, sort by comments, trees on anything new in the top ten, plus hot/new on the one subreddit that actually lives the problem. Store post ids so you do not re-quote the same 2022 thread every quarter. When the community’s words change, change the keyword. That is the method. A new tool will not save you from skipping the tree.
App-store greps and YouTube comments wait until this pass has a phrase list. Otherwise you search stores for your own jargon and find nothing.
Keep the other jobs in other docs
OSINT is investigation. News monitoring is headlines. App-store reviews are software ratings. Reddit-as-research is the community arguing in public. Docs on reddit.fetcher.sh. 402 or a key from /topup. If you needed recruited respondents, hire a panel — do not pretend 400 comments are 400 people in a study. Re-read the trees you stored last quarter before you fetch new ones; half the “new insights” will already be in the file. That is research discipline, not an API feature. If the next question is billing, open the store reviews. If the next question is a video, open YouTube comments. This page stays the subreddit and the tree so it does not swallow the cross-host note.