Reddit threads have a lot of uses in marketing. We can get content ideas, do audience research, and much more. But it can be really cumbersome to go in there and expand all the subthreads and replies, and a lot of the marketing gold can be found there.
This is a great solution for that. What you do is just take the URL of the thread you're looking at, add a little extension to the URL, open it up, and it's JSON. You have the original post, all the comments, all the replies—everything is right there for you to access.
The Simple Trick
Here's how to do this:
First, access the thread that you're interested in. In this example, I'm looking up how to learn guitar to see what people are saying about it. One thing I definitely like to do is choose a thread that has a lot of answers. I want a lot of material to work with in this exercise.
Now, here's where the trick comes in. When you visit the thread, it's going to produce a URL. Just grab that URL and add .json to the end of it.
That's the trick. And what that is going to produce is a mess of information—but this is all the information from the thread. It's the original post and all the comments and replies.
Pro tip: In the top left, click the box that says "pretty print" because it's going to generate a much better display of the JSON and it's going to start making a lot more sense to you.
Understanding the JSON Structure
Now let's dig into the code just a little bit. When I first look at this, I like to get my bearings on what I'm looking at.
The selftext key has a value of the original post. For example: "I just got my first guitar a few days ago, but I don't know where to start." If you go back to the Reddit thread, you'll see that is the original post.
If we go a little bit lower, you'll see things like body and body_HTML. The body key is going to be one of the comments below the original post. You'll see this repeated in a key called body_HTML—it's just a repeat of the same comment.
What's really useful is the key called ups. Ups is Reddit's upvotes, and there's a specific reason I like this so much.
Three Uses of Reddit JSON
Grabbing information from a Reddit thread, there are three uses I want to talk about:
1. Discovering Questions and Pain Points
I love getting into these threads and seeing what questions people are asking. The original post is often a question, so that's gold right there. But you'll see people talking in the comments and asking follow-up questions. They share things that they struggle with. That kind of stuff I love for learning about an audience and coming up with potential content ideas.
2. Finding the Most Upvoted Comments
This is where those upvotes come in. You can just hit Command+A (on a Mac) and select everything and copy it. Then you can hop over to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. You can drop this information in. I use Claude and I like to turn on extended thinking and use the Opus model because it's better for complex tasks, and there can be a lot of JSON here to sift through.
What I'll do is I will ask it to find the comments that have the most upvotes. Why am I doing that? Well, I want to see what those comments are because people are clearly finding them useful. A lot of times what you'll see in the most upvoted comments is advice that people really value, and I think this is a great thing for brands to be aware of.
Often you can use that to guide some of your content initiatives. Maybe we're thinking of the next social post that we're going to do, or we think of a blog post we wrote on this topic but we didn't include a piece of advice. The insights we get from looking at these comments could become more effective social posts or a great update we do in a blog post refresh.
3. Identifying the Most Engaged Comments
There's one more thing I like to do with this information, and it's a little bit more complex. You might want to explore different solutions for it, but you can get away with using an LLM for this. Once again, I use Claude with extended thinking on and the most powerful model.
What I'm going to ask it to do is find the comment that has the most replies. There's no key and value for this in the JSON—I wish there was. So the tool really just has to count this manually, and it doesn't do it perfectly every time. But I would suggest that you at least try to do this and always bounce back to the thread itself to verify the accuracy of what the LLM has returned to you.
I'll ask it to find comments that have the most replies. Why am I doing this? Because that can be a signal of engagement. If I find a comment that gets a lot of replies or a lot of engagement, again, I want to dive into that a little deeper and investigate: what is it about this comment that's getting people to reply so much and engage so much? There might be an insight there that we can apply to our own social media posts or content.
Summary
That's how you turn Reddit threads into JSON. That's how you get all the expanded comments and replies without having to manually click them and then copy paste. And that's three ways you can use this information to inform content and learn about your audience.
I hope you found that useful!
