Week 2 Reddit tutorial

Summary

The tutorial introduces Reddit’s community structure and demonstrates how to collect post data with PRAW, a Python library for working with Reddit.

How Reddit is organized

• Reddit’s communities are called subreddits, identified by names such as r/Olympics or r/India.
• Users interact with posts through upvotes and comments. Comments can receive replies, creating multiple levels of discussion.
• Subreddits may have rules, moderators, and links to related communities, which can help users discover other subreddits.
• Flairs label posts by topic, much like hashtags on other social platforms.
• Posts can contain text, images, videos, or links to external sources.

Collecting Reddit data with PRAW

The demonstration walks through a basic collection workflow:

1. Create a Reddit application

   • Log in to Reddit and open the application settings on the older Reddit interface.
   • Choose Create an app, provide the requested details, and select script for a personal-use script application.
   • Reddit provides credentials for authentication. The tutorial does not show the keys because they may reveal personal information.

2. Install and prepare the Python tools

   • Use PRAW to connect to Reddit and pandas to organize the collected data in data frames.
   • Authenticate PRAW using the application’s client ID and client secret, along with the Reddit password, username, and user-agent name.
   • Keep credentials private.

3. Choose a subreddit and retrieve posts

   • Create a subreddit object—for example, for India.
   • Request a limited set of posts, such as the 100 “hot” posts.
   • The tutorial also demonstrates using all to retrieve posts across Reddit.

4. Choose fields to collect

The example builds a record for each post with its:

  - Title
  - Subreddit
  - Score (upvotes)
  - ID
  - URL
  - Number of comments
  - Creation time
  - Body text

Some posts have no body text because they consist of media or external links.

1. Organize and inspect the results

   • Store the post records in a dictionary and convert them into a pandas data frame.
   • Use the data frame’s preview to inspect the first few records.
   • In the demonstration, the top 100 posts from Reddit’s broad feed came from 93 distinct subreddits.

2. Save the data

   • Save data frames to CSV files with pandas so the collected information remains available after closing the notebook.
   • The tutorial reloads a saved file to check that the data can be read back. Minor formatting differences, such as missing-value representations, may occur.

Documentation and further exploration

• The tutorial points to the PRAW documentation for installation, OAuth authentication, Reddit instances, and available methods.
• A Reddit instance can expose account information and support other interactions.
• PRAW tutorials also cover tasks such as monitoring submissions and automatically replying with a bot.
• Searching the documentation for a data type—such as comments—can reveal methods for retrieving it from different Reddit feeds or contexts.
• The broader goal is to use Reddit data to study social-network activity and examine links to external sources such as news sites and Twitter.

Speakers and sources featured

• Speaker: One tutorial narrator; no additional speakers are identifiable in the subtitles.
• Sources and platforms: Reddit, the PRAW documentation (praw.readthedocs.io), and Python/pandas as used in the demonstration.