Reddit API Overview

Get familiar with the Reddit API.

The Reddit API

The Reddit API endpoints allow us to build many valuable tools for ourselves and others. A typical example of the Reddit API in action is a comment bot, which scrapes new posts and comments on them. Imagine a sentiment-analyzing application that can read the incoming posts on a subreddit. It can respond with a motivational quote whenever it finds a negative sentiment in the post. In addition, as Reddit has abundant text, it is usually used to train machine learning algorithms at very large scales.

The API allows the following uses through its various endpoints:

  • Add, block, and message other users on Reddit.

  • Create and manage collections, wikis, and flairs.

  • Interact with posts on subreddits via voting and commenting.

  • Moderate incoming posts to a subreddit.

  • Answer and manage mod mail.

JavaScript wrapper for the Reddit API

While we can directly use the API, there are different wrappers offered in different languages for Reddit to make API use easier. Snoowrap is one such wrapper in JavaScript that we can import like any other JavaScript library. In this course, we'll first explore endpoints directly using the Reddit API. Then we'll switch gears and learn the snoowrap module as well.