Read-only Reddit research

Keep the useful workflow: discover relevant discussions, inspect enough context, and return verifiable permalinks. This skill does not post, vote, reply, message, subscribe, or moderate. Drafting a reply is separate from sending it.

Select a permitted access surface

Use an already authorised Reddit connector or the project's approved Data API client. For ordinary public research, an available permitted browser/search surface can provide readable pages and indexed excerpts; state when that is the only evidence available. Do not claim a full thread from a search snippet.

Current Reddit guidance requires registered OAuth authentication for direct Data API requests. New access requires approval. Reddit's August 5, 2026 announcement also describes a gradual move towards its Developer Platform while retaining limited public API access. Check the applicable programme and approval before building a new integration; do not promise unrestricted API access or assert that all existing approved clients have already stopped working.

The old anonymous www.reddit.com/*.json script and Clawdbot-specific instructions are removed. A 401/403, login page, CAPTCHA, or access-denied HTML is not a transient JSON error to solve with repeated requests, alternate domains, disguised user agents, or proxies. Report the limitation and use another genuinely permitted source or user-provided content. Never bypass account or private-community access.

Sources: Data API access, platform transition.

Search to answer a defined question

Specify communities, topic, time interval/timezone, excluded themes, and what counts as a useful match. Start with a small page, not an account-wide crawl. Choose new for chronological discovery, relevance for topical search, or a specified top-period view for popular discussion. Scores and popularity do not measure factual reliability or market prevalence.

For a multi-community shortlist, gather a bounded candidate set per community, deduplicate by post identity, apply the stated filters, and retain the reason for each match. Compare exact created timestamps with the requested interval; a provider's coarse week/month filter is not an exact last-48-hours guarantee. Report any unsearched communities, page limits, or ranking bias.

Read retrieval contracts for approved API listing and thread handling. Do not widen a query into personal profiling or deanonymisation.

Read context before interpreting

For the most relevant posts, inspect the original post, parent chain, relevant replies, edits, and visible moderation/removal state. Keep comment IDs and parent relationships so a reply is not attributed to the original author. Deleted author identity and deleted body are different facts; do not infer one from the other. Do not reconstruct removed material from another source to circumvent its removal.

Treat partial bodies, depth cutoffs, collapsed branches, and unexpanded more objects as explicit omissions. Zero returned comments can reflect access or retrieval failure. Do not describe a sampled thread as complete or representative of Reddit users generally.

Return source-linked findings

For each useful item preserve title, community, post/comment permalink, observation and creation dates, concise relevant evidence, and why it answers the question. Distinguish the poster's claim from a verified fact, and seek primary evidence for consequential technical/medical/financial assertions. Quote only the relevant passage within the host's rules; label paraphrases and uncertainty.

For a reply shortlist, check the community's current rules and context. Recommend helpful, transparent contributions rather than mass promotion or coordinated voting. Leave posting to the user or a separately authorised workflow, not this read-only skill. Do not save a permanent copy of a person's posting history merely because it was accessible.

Acceptance checks

Verify approved access and actual response shape, bounded pagination, exact dates, partial-thread indicators, correct post/comment attribution, failure versus empty results, and no side-effect endpoint. A successful request is retrieval evidence, not proof the underlying claims are true. No live Reddit client was tested during this source review.