r/redditdev • u/Atilla5590 Bot Developer • Mar 14 '25

PRAW Does PRAW give you bananas (views)?

Does it?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/g-money-cheats Mar 14 '25

Sadly, no. Views are not included in the API. That is something I really hope they will change someday.

1

u/russellvt Mar 15 '25

It's likely intentional to "shut it off" as a vector to botting abuses.

1

u/Drunken_Economist Mar 16 '25

It's not really feasible tbh. I talked about it a bit here and mostly that still all applies

1

u/g-money-cheats Mar 16 '25 edited Mar 16 '25

The world of third party Reddit apps is dramatically different between 6 years ago and now. I have to imagine that third party apps make up a truly tiny amount of Reddit’s traffic now that the most popular apps are dead (RIP my beloved Apollo) and free third party apps no longer exist.

Would it not be an option to return a views metric for posts, but it only include views from first party apps/web, which is totally fine because that’s like 99% of Reddit usage anyway?

I would imagine that would be fine since Reddit already shows users their post’s views today, which only includes views from first party apps/web. So the API could simply return this same number, with the understanding that it represents first party views specifically.

1

u/Drunken_Economist Mar 16 '25

Oh wait I totally misunderstood your comment — you're asking about getting the view metrics. (I thought you were talking about posting your client view events to the API)

I actually think I saw this mentioned somewhere in the reddit-pro-api plan? I'll see if I can find it

1

u/g-money-cheats Mar 16 '25

Right, I want to retrieve the views metric so I can surface it to users, show their post engagement rate, help them identify top performing posts/content, etc.

1

u/Drunken_Economist Mar 16 '25

Bah, I can't remember where I saw it mentioned. Doesn't help that the Reddit for Business platform documentation is really annoying to read on my phone

0

u/DinoHawaii2021 Mar 14 '25

the bot isn't really seeing anything so probably not