Profiles and search

Beyond a single listing, reddit reads profiles and runs the site's search. All of it comes off the same public .json view.

User and subreddit profiles

reddit user spez
reddit subreddit golang

Both take a bare name, a u/ or r/ prefix, or a full URL. A user record carries the name and full name, the account age, link and comment karma, and the gold and verified flags. A subreddit record carries the name and full name, the title and public description, the subscriber count, the created date, the type (public, restricted, private), and the over-18 flag.

Both take several names at once:

reddit subreddit golang rust zig -o csv

subreddit answers to sub and r; user answers to u.

A user's posts and comments

reddit user-posts spez -n 50
reddit user-comments spez -n 50

user-posts lists what a user submitted; user-comments lists what they wrote. Both page like any listing: cap with -n, walk pages with --pages.

Searching posts

reddit search "context deadline"               # site-wide
reddit search "generics" --in golang -n 25      # within one community

--in restricts the search to a subreddit. Sort and window it:

reddit search "release" --sort new
reddit search "best of" --sort top --time year

--sort takes relevance, hot, top, new, or comments; --time takes the usual windows. --nsfw includes over-18 results, which are filtered out by default.

Discovering communities and people

subreddits and users search the directories by name rather than searching content:

reddit subreddits programming -n 20
reddit users gallowboob -n 20

subreddits returns community records (name, subscribers, description); users returns account records.

Classifying without fetching

id turns any URL or id into its (kind, id) pair offline, which is the safe way to branch in a script before spending a request:

reddit id t3_1abc23 u/spez https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1abc23/title/

INPUT                                                   KIND  ID
t3_1abc23                                               post  1abc23
u/spez                                                  user  spez
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1abc23/title/  post  1abc23

reddit maps Reddit's "thing" types to the names it prints: a link (t3) shows as post, an account (t2) as user, a comment (t1) as comment, and a subreddit (t5) as subreddit. open resolves the same input to a URL and opens it in your browser:

reddit open 1abc23