The thing everyone gets wrong about Reddit research
A product manager bookmarks a 400-comment thread on a tool comparison and never finishes it. The post is sharp. The replies are where people admit what they actually run day to day, what they burned on usage, and why the screenshot benchmarks are a joke.
Everyone treats the post as the research. That is the mistake.
The post is the prompt
If you research a category for a PM, a journalist, or a founder about to pick a daily driver, you already have two bad habits. One: read the original post, skim three gold comments, and walk away with the OP’s framing. Two: copy a slab of the thread into a chatbot and get a mushy recap that flattens vote weight, sarcasm, and the split between two camps.
The first habit misses the product. On Reddit the question is often a prompt. The answers are the thread. “Which one are you actually using daily?” is not answered in the title. It is answered in the pile of people who live in the terminal versus the people who want the IDE, the ones who run both, and the ones who are really arguing about cost.
The second habit misses the texture. A generic summary does not tell you that the memorable line was “stop treating them like the same product with different logos,” or that cost and limits dominated the skeptical takes. You wanted a TL;DR of the discussion, not a paraphrase of the post.
I wanted that without a Reddit API key, a session cookie, or a scraper to keep alive. Paste the public post URL. Fetch a slice of the comment thread. Summarize the discussion as a discussion — camps, objections, the advice that got upvoted — not as a winner graphic.
Paste the thread, take the TL;DR
Give it a public Reddit post URL. Choose how many comments to include and a sort hint such as top or new. Read the title, the subreddit, how many comments went into the model, and a written summary of the thread.
That is the Reddit Post Comments Summarizer API. Run it on Apify.
I do not ask you for credentials. Comments come through a dedicated Reddit scraper in the same platform; this API is the orchestration and the write-up. You still decide whether ten comments or a few hundred is the right sample. You are not reading every nested reply in r/all.
Who this is for
If you are a product researcher who cannot spend an hour inside a comparison thread before a meeting, this is for you. If you write about tools and you need the comment-section consensus, not the blog-post consensus, this is for you. If you watch a launch and the real objections showed up under a Reddit post, this is for you.
If you need a full archive, user PII, or a private subreddit, this is not that. Public posts. A sample of comments, not the entire internet.
The summary is only as good as the comments you fetched. A “top 10” slice is a different object than 500 replies sorted by new. Input, pricing, and the rest of the caveats live on the Apify Store README for this summarizer.
When the source is a single speaker on camera instead of a crowd, turning a YouTube video into an SEO article is the other direction. Both sit with the other posts on rainminer.
Skimming the OP is not research
The cost of the old way is a product decision informed by a title and three anecdotes, or a chatbot recap that sounds confident and erases the split. The thread was the research. The post was the prompt.
Paste the URL. Read the discussion.