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Reddit is an aggregator of websites that can be ranked by users. It contains subreddits to categorize topics and users can comment on these. Reddit is #13 in the Alexa rank and it has 330 million monthly active users.
That’s equivalent to the total population in the US.
Here are a few tricks for sourcing with Reddit.
The most obvious interaction is to use the search.
On the home page. Let’s try this query: hadoop engineer looking.
The first result says r/BigDataJobs. Not a great subreddit. It is flooded with ‘hiring’ posts and there is no user engagement.
The next section of results is better:
10 comments. A few people replied interested. You can research their name from their username.123 comments. A lot of great data here.You could piggyback on someone else’s post, reply to their comments. If they are interested, you could DM them.
I searched for a user I found on one of the previous results.
It took a few minutes to process the query. Then it showed a dashboard with a summary of this user’s activity.
Subreddits: A list where the user submitted a link or commented.User data: name, ID, other basic dataKarma data: number of links, number of comments, L/C ratio (links/comments)Link data: Most upvotes, best, worst, karma/linkComment data: Upvotes, downvotes, best, worst, karma/commentThe website also has an FAQ that explains where the data is coming from.
With this tool you can find metrics for subreddits:
I’d like to know more about this subreddit: Cscareerquestions
200K subscribers in July 2019.The subreddit has a lot of engagement. The top post shows:
Many of the comments have a link to a resume. Some are anonymized. If you have good sourcing skills you could figure out their names and contact details.
This tool shows user analytics with a great user interface. The query was processed much faster than Reddit Investigator.
Basic data:
English-based text analysis:
97% (calculated through controversy and text analysis)Low (calculated with the Flesch formula)The other common sections:
Here is a list of popular Reddit tools found on Github
It sends a newsletter to users when their favorite subreddit has a new post.
If you are into coding, this is a great interface to view and interact with Reddit from the terminal.
If you know JavaScript, you can customize your own Reddit analytics dashboard.
It can extract media from submissions and comments. It requires basic Python knowledge to install.
Reddit’s search provides a lot of opportunity to source data. You can also try a few free tools to complement this search or use some technical tools to extract more data.