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Reddit is a link aggregator and bulletin board silo. Community members in multiple communities (subreddits) may submit links and text posts, vote on the submitted entries, and post comments. As community members vote a post up or down, the site and moderators determine how to position a post within the news feed.
The algorithmic upvote / downvote system means Reddit may serve as an effective crowd-sourced curation and discovery tool. In theory the "best" links (as determined by a particular subreddit's users) are pushed to the top. As a result, sites pushed to Reddit's front page experience may experience traffic surges.
How to
How to backfeed
Bridgy backfeed Reddit posts and comments
If you go to https://brid.gy/ there’s an option to authenticate with Reddit, when you do so, Bridgy connects via your authorization and can then send you webmentions for Reddit posts that link to your site, and first level comments on those posts.
- See related: Reddit: backfeed nested comments #1014
Or you can DIY:
Poll feeds without authentication
Reddit provides an XML (RSS 2.0) and JSON feed by domain.
Example for tommorris.org: JSON, XML
Check out those URLs and create equivalents to poll for backfeed for your own domain!
How to export
Anyone know how to export your posts and comments from Reddit?
Into what format?
- Reddit has an API that returns data in JSON or XML. [1]
gRegor Morrill 16:13, 22 July 2015 (PDT) - Reddit also puts out RSS and JSON feeds for various portions
- example: RSS feed for https://www.reddit.com/r/example/ is https://www.reddit.com/r/example.rss and JSON would be https://www.reddit.com/r/example.json
- There are also RSS and JSON feeds for private feeds, private profile pages, and various parts of one's inbox that are available at: https://www.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/
Basic Reddit Content Exporter (Reddit to JSON, runs in-browser)
I (
Dan Q) have implemented a block of Javascript that you can use to export all of your Reddit comments, posts, gildings, upvoted-things etc. as a huge block of JSON. It runs in your browser to exploit make use of your Reddit cookie rather than using a modhash. As a result, it's best for one-off bulk exports rather than ongoing-PESOS: however, it could easily be adapted. It can also be used to export other people's data, but it'll only get that which is visible to the user you're logged-in as (e.g. it won't get their posts in subreddits you're not a member of, it won't get their upvotes unless they've opted-in to sharing that data, etc.).
Get it at https://gist.github.com/Dan-Q/1129e91db2c74cdd0c057b477702bfca. Instructions are at the top.
Features
The features below are only available to Reddit community members:
- Vote posts up or down to determine their position in the site feed
- Deeply-threaded comment system
- The ability to create your own category pages (called "subreddits")
Criticism
- 2026-10-01 : I’m leaving Reddit because of RSS
- 2026-10-01 : Re: I’m leaving Reddit because of RSS
- 2024-03-14 : Can Reddit Survive Its Own IPO? (archived)
- 2024-02-17 Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content / Over a decade of valuable user content is now for sale as Reddit preps to go public.
- 2023-06-13 : What Reddit Got Wrong (archived)
- 2023-06-05 The Verge: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps / App developers have said next month’s changes to Reddit’s API pricing could make their apps unsustainable. Now, dozens of the site’s biggest subreddits plan to go private for two days in protest.
- 2023-06-12 Subreddit darkening tracker: Reddark (partially archived)
- 2020-10-23 Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit
- 2020-03-25 YouTube: Reddit Disinformation & How We Beat It Together - Smarter Every Day 232 (video, time offset, total duration 24:02)
- 2018-04-19 New York Magazine: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’ / A conversation with former Reddit product head Dan McComas on the problems of growth as a metric and what Twitter is doing wrong.
- The Death of Reddit by Chuq Von Rospach, 2015-07-11
- Not very POSSE-friendly:

- Karma system is vulnerable to karma farming by bots and other bad actors
- Blocking third party clients
- Blocks Internet Archive as of early August 2025
- 2026-04-30 : Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead (archived)
- not a great place for creating sustainable communities around technology
- "Any suggestions for fora about structured data for the web, in particular http://Schema.org, JSON-LD, etc? I only found a couple of moribund reddits." @alamajesse December 28, 2021