Archive Your Reddit Knowledge Whereas You Nonetheless Can
tl;dr: I wrote a tool to make a searchable archive of your Reddit information. I might counsel downloading and working it earlier than June thirtieth, 2023.
In case you’re an energetic Reddit consumer, you will have heard about impending changes to its public API. This transfer can have widespread impression on Redditors, together with the death of beloved third social gathering shoppers and a few subreddits even going dark indefinitely. These adjustments mark the start of the (apparently) inevitable enshittification of Reddit as a platform. Realizing this bummed me out greater than I anticipated the loss of life of an internet site may.
I have been a reasonably energetic Redditor for greater than 11 years. Till now, it has been the web site with the most effective mixture of neighborhood, recognition, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary worth Reddit as a data retailer is actually priceless; it is a modern-day Library of Alexandria. So once I noticed the writing on the wall, I grew to become frightened about probably the most beneficial factor I might contributed to Reddit: my posts and feedback.
I’ve posted many tales, jokes, and (dare I say) insightful feedback on Reddit over time. Once I heard the information, I noticed I might be upset if I wasn’t in a position to entry my contributions anymore. I will often wish to return and discover particular feedback I made years in the past, a job which the net UI would not make easy (there’s lots of clicking “subsequent web page” concerned).
Reddit does have a function to export your data into a GDPR archive, but it surely’s fairly barebones – solely the plaintext of the remark, the subreddit title, the timestamp, and weirdly, the variety of awards. Sadly, the very best constancy information comes from the API, which is strictly what is going on to be altering/worsening quickly. So it felt pressing to create an archive of my private API information.
The venerable SQLite project permits storing structured, searchable information in a single file. This leads us to my venture, reddit-user-to-sqlite. It is a small Python instrument which builds an archive of all your posts and feedback. You’ll be able to learn all about it right here: https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/
Working it requires a little bit of consolation with the command line, however with the ability to paste 3 instructions right into a terminal will get you what you want:
- install pipx
- run
pipx set up reddit-user-to-sqlite - run
reddit-user-to-sqlite consumer YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
After working, you may get a database file that you should use with Datasette:
Every column is sortable and you may carry out full-text search in your feedback (and posts):
Your content material being in a database means it is easy to get insights about your utilization. For example, I can see the quantity of karma I’ve gotten from every subreddit, or the place I remark probably the most.
The instrument additionally helps studying information from a GDPR archive, which can proceed working after the API is shut down (albeit with some information lacking, like rating). See the docs for more information.
Better of all, your content material is yours once more. As soon as it is archived, it is in a file that they’ll by no means take away from you. (It doesn’t matter what silly issues they preserve doing to the platform.) The reddit-user-to-sqlite will replace an present database with new information for those who run it once more, so be at liberty to run it periodically to maintain your archive up-to-date.
I’ve obtained no clue what’s going to occur after the API phrases have modified. If you are going to create an archive, ensure that to do it earlier than June thirtieth, 2023.
Let me know when you have any questions or come throughout any points. I will attempt to get them fastened earlier than the deadline. Till then, completely satisfied archiving!