Extracting Reddit data with chat bots (blog.hakanserce.com)

A Reddit user wanted to extract API recommendations from a long thread but found that mainstream AI assistants couldn’t directly access Reddit and manual copy‑paste was impractical. The practical fix was to use Reddit’s built‑in JSON endpoint (append .json to any thread URL) and jq, the command‑line JSON processor, to pull comment text. For example: curl -A "Mozilla/5.0" https://.../comments/<id>/.json | jq ".[].data.children[].data.body" extracts all comment bodies for downstream analysis by an LLM or other tooling. This lightweight pipeline avoids complex scraping libraries or API keys and is ideal for quick, one‑off extraction tasks. For the AI/ML community the technique is significant because it demonstrates a reliable, reproducible way to turn long forum discussions into structured inputs for models—useful for prompt engineering, dataset construction, and rapid literature or tool discovery. Alternatives include a Python script or a Tampermonkey browser script for a more polished workflow, but jq’s simplicity and speed make it compelling for ad hoc work. Important caveat: check Reddit’s Data API Terms and User Agreement before collecting or using this data beyond personal research to ensure compliance with rate limits and privacy/usage policies.