Reddit followed Twitter’s path by blocking third-party applications and transformed its sharing space into an absolute network of control.
On June 30, 2023 (in two days from publishing this) the changes will be effective.
Third-party applications will disappear and I estimate about 30% of the content
of the social networkof the institutional surveillance service.
Reddit has a button that would eventually give you your data, but it doesn’t work. I used it almost a month ago and so far I haven’t had any responses:
I’m copying the simplest and fastest alternative I found to download comments and personal information from Reddit.
It’s for Debian (Linux) but you can use it on Windows or Mac because Python is cross-platform.
First of all, check your preferences
Because if you didn’t check it before, you collaborated with several servers, services and institutions, giving them permission to make a lot of money with your time:
I do NOT want to appear in search engines, personalize my experience be sold junk, or recommendations have my screen polluted with ads.
Continue after deactivating that nonsense from your profile
Download data from Reddit
- Install Python if you don’t have it on your system, and then the Python packages
pipxandreddit-user-to-sqlite.
apt install python3
apt install pip
pip install pipx
pipx install reddit-user-to-sqlite
- Create the
metadata.jsonfile with this code, in the folder where you are going to download your data:
{
"databases": {
"reddit": {
"tables": {
"comments": {
"sort_desc": "timestamp",
"plugins": {
"datasette-render-markdown": {
"columns": ["text"]
},
"datasette-render-timestamps": {
"columns": ["timestamp"]
}
}
},
"posts": {
"sort_desc": "timestamp",
"plugins": {
"datasette-render-markdown": {
"columns": ["text"]
},
"datasette-render-timestamps": {
"columns": ["timestamp"]
}
}
},
"subreddits": {
"sort": "name"
}
}
}
}
}
-
Run
reddit-user-to-sqliteand view the downloaded information in sqlite format (.dbfile) preferably indatasetteor SQLiteBrowser. -
Browse the dump and do whatever you want with the info, you can export it to JSON and eventually link it to other projects
Commands without output
PC@PC:~$ mkdir reddit
PC@PC:~$ cd reddit
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pip install pipx
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pipx install reddit-user-to-sqlite
PC@PC:~/reddit$ reddit-user-to-sqlite user satoshinotdead
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pipx install datasette
PC@PC:~/reddit$ nano metadata.json
PC@PC:~/reddit$ datasette reddit.db --metadata metadata.json
Commands with output
PC@PC:~$ mkdir reddit
PC@PC:~$ cd reddit
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pipx install reddit-user-to-sqlite
bash: pipx: command not found
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pip install pipx
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting pipx
Downloading pipx-1.2.0-py3-none-any.whl (57 kB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 57.8/57.8 kB 744.3 kB/s eta 0:00:00
Collecting userpath>=1.6.0
Downloading userpath-1.8.0-py3-none-any.whl (9.0 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: packaging>=20.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pipx) (20.9)
Collecting argcomplete>=1.9.4
Downloading argcomplete-3.1.1-py3-none-any.whl (41 kB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 41.5/41.5 kB 2.9 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Collecting click
Downloading click-8.1.3-py3-none-any.whl (96 kB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 96.6/96.6 kB 1.9 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: click, argcomplete, userpath, pipx
Successfully installed argcomplete-3.1.1 click-8.1.3 pipx-1.2.0 userpath-1.8.0
[notice] A new release of pip is available: 23.0.1 -> 23.1.2
[notice] To update, run: python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pipx install reddit-user-to-sqlite
installed package reddit-user-to-sqlite 0.4.1, installed using Python 3.9.2
These apps are now globally available
- reddit-user-to-sqlite
done! ✨ 🌟 ✨
PC@PC:~/reddit$ reddit-user-to-sqlite user satoshinotdead
loading data about /u/satoshinotdead into reddit.db
fetching (up to 10 pages of) comments
30%|█████████████████████████████████████████████▉ | 3/10 [00:04<00:09, 1.42s/it]
saved/updated 331 comments
fetching (up to 10 pages of) posts
0%| | 0/10 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
saved/updated 12 posts
PC@PC:~/reddit$ ls -l
total 296
-rw-r--r-- 1 PC PC 299008 jun 28 11:29 reddit.db
PC@PC:~/reddit$ pipx install datasette
installed package datasette 0.64.3, installed using Python 3.9.2
These apps are now globally available
- datasette
done! ✨ 🌟 ✨
PC@PC:~/reddit$ nano metadata.json
PC@PC:~/reddit$ datasette reddit.db --metadata metadata.json
INFO: Started server process [46765]
INFO: Waiting for application startup.
INFO: Application startup complete.
INFO: Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:8001 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54230 - "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54230 - "GET /-/static/app.css?d59929 HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54230 - "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54230 - "GET /reddit/comments HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54230 - "GET /-/static/app.css?d59929 HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
INFO: 127.0.0.1:54238 - "GET /-/static/table.js HTTP/1.1" 200 OK
Result from datasette
Which can be read by running the app and clicking on the web address returned by the terminal http://127.0.0.1:8001:
Result from SQLiteBrowser
Opening the reddit.db file generated by reddit-user-to-sqlite:
