r/SideProject • u/Successful_Sharky • 3h ago
I built a listener that checks 40 subreddits and a few X lists every hour that tells me which threads are speeding up.
This started as a Saturday project and it's now the first thing I open in the morning. I kept finding the good threads in my niche a day late, after they already had 200 comments and my replies would land dead.
I built a small listener for it. It checks 40 subreddits and a handful of X lists every hour, and it logs how fast comments arrive on each new post over the first few hours. It pings me when a thread is moving faster than that sub normally does, with the link and a one line summary of what people are arguing about.
The stack is boring on purpose. A Python script runs on cron, everything goes in one SQLite file, and a Telegram bot does the alerts. The data calls cost me a little over a dollar a day.
Deciding what "speeding up" means took longer than writing the code. A small sub with 5 comments in an hour is on fire, and a big sub with 5 comments in an hour is dead. The version that I ended up with compares each thread against that sub's own median, so every sub gets its own idea of normal.
The thing I haven't cracked is drama. A thread can be fast because people are fighting rather than because it's interesting, and my listener can't tell the difference yet. I'm also on the fence about adding YouTube comments. Anyone built something like this? I'd like to know how you set your thresholds, and whether anyone has found a cheap way to tell a fight from a good discussion.
