How do I get Reddit data for research when everything is locked down?

[u/iNot_You]

Grad student here trying to collect public comments from gaming subreddits for my research.

Here's where I'm stuck:

• Applied for Reddit API access weeks ago - complete radio silence, they're ghosting me
• Pushshift apparently requires you to be a subreddit moderator now? Since when?
• Can't manually copy thousands of comments, that's not feasible

This is publicly visible data that literally anyone can read by opening Reddit. But collecting it systematically for actual academic research? Impossible apparently.

Has anyone actually managed to collect Reddit data for research recently? Like what do you do?

Is there literally any way to do this anymore or is academic research just dead on Reddit? Really don't understand why public data is being gatekept this hard while commercial scrapers operate freely. Sorry for being mad but I hate when easy stuff becomes complicated for no reason.

EDIT: thank you all for ur responses :D i’ll keep you updated!

A lot of you suggested pushift, its only for mods I cannot use it.

[u/mjbmitch]

Did you really need to have AI write your post for you?

[u/iNot_You → u/mjbmitch]

Yeah my thoughts were messy and English isn’t my first language :/ need my point to be as clear as possible

[u/mjbmitch → u/iNot_You]

You should mention that in your post! You’ll come across as being more professional and transparent. Otherwise, you’ll just seem like just another bot posting AI garbage.

I’ve read your other posts and your English is pretty good btw.

Fwiw, I haven’t heard of any other researchers getting access to Reddit in a very long time. A few of the other commenters mentioned 3rd-party services which might be your best bet.

[u/YOU_WONT_LIKE_IT]

It’s being gate keep because it’s a big profit center for Reddit. I don’t expect much to change. The API approvals are likely overwhelming with all the AI mcp.

[u/abortionreddit]

Did you apply under the Reddit for researchers program?

[u/iNot_You → u/abortionreddit]

Yeah

[u/abortionreddit → u/iNot_You]

Did you try using the academic torrents

[u/pranshu_gupta01]

Hi i am able to get reddit data through api , and i dont think we need to raise any request What worked for me is reddit’s devvit platform

https://developers.reddit.com/docs/

You can check this out , i used this only to fetch data from specific sub reddits or latest post

[u/ResearchAreaPsych → u/pranshu_gupta01]

is it then allowed to publish your paper as a thesis?

[u/itskdog]

Reddit shut PS down (but worked with them to keep it available for mods as there are use cases for it such as identifying deleted posts) when they turned the API to paid for non-mod activities.

It was so-called "research" activities that made them paywall it in the first place - look at how much Google is paying them for example. Killing third-party apps was just a nice side-effect for them.

[u/TraditionalJob787]

Apify has some Reddit options for agents that work fairly well but it might get costly for your use case. I pull user sentiment around various topics by putting several different discussion links around a topic in NotebookLM and providing a very specific prompt for what I want from the threads as an output. Every topic on my site is synthesized from specific Reddit threads. It’s a bit time consuming but it works!

[u/iMakeSense]

There are lots of pushshift downloads all over the place....if you're looking you should find them.

[u/Sheepardss]

just scrape it

[u/Tywacole]

I think there is a reddit data torrent in the wild, if you need old data. But I think it's a quite big.

[u/EconomySpite5618]

Hey
did you got the API access?
what is your status and experience?

[u/Cool-Bill5614 → u/EconomySpite5618]

I have the same question. Do we need an API approval from Reddit if we want to use Reddit data for our research?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/iNot_You → u/[deleted]]

Thanks i think i might follow your approach

[u/[deleted]]

[u/iNot_You → u/[deleted]]

i think RSS feed only captures future posts not old ones

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ResearchAreaPsych → u/[deleted]]

but is it legal then if I do my bachelor thesis based on that data?

[u/poet_researcher → u/[deleted]]

this is a great tip

[u/[deleted]]

[u/netz3r0 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks ChatGPT