Why comments were the hard part
Reddit's API served comments per thread. To follow comments across a community you polled a listing that was easy to miss items on, and to follow comments across the site there was no good path at all. RSS had a comments feed per community that was partial and rate limited, and it ends on 13 Nov 2026. Yet comments are where the conversation is: the recommendation, the complaint, the correction and the lead are replies, not titles.
Redlisten treats comments as a feed in their own right. Every public comment on Reddit enters one ordered stream with a cursor, and the same comments are served per community, per thread and per author in the Reddit style formats your code already reads.
The sitewide feed
GET /v1/comments returns comments in the order they entered the feed, up to 1,000 a page, with next_cursor and has_more. Pass cursor=latest to start from now, since= with an ISO time to start from a point in the window, or a saved cursor to resume exactly where you stopped. When has_more is true, ask for the next page straight away; when it is false, you are caught up and can wait a few seconds.
import os, time, requests
BASE = "https://api.redlisten.com"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['REDLISTEN_KEY']}"}
cursor = load_cursor() or "latest"
while True:
page = requests.get(f"{BASE}/v1/comments", headers=H,
params={"cursor": cursor, "limit": 1000}, timeout=60).json()
for c in page["data"]:
if "refund" in c["body"].lower():
handle(c) # c["id"], c["post_id"], c["parent_id"], c["community"], c["author"]["name"]
cursor = page["next_cursor"]
save_cursor(cursor)
if not page["has_more"]:
time.sleep(5)Each comment carries id, post_id, parent_id, depth, created_at, the author's name and stable account id, the community, the full body in Markdown, permalink, score, is_op, distinguished, detected language and a status of live, removed or deleted. A removed comment is delivered again with its status changed and its captured text kept. Treat id as the key and upsert.
Per community, per thread, per author
/r/{sub}/comments and /r/{a}+{b}/comments return new comments in one or more communities as a Reddit style Listing, paged with limit and after, and as an Atom feed with .rss and ?key= for a reader. /r/all/comments is the whole site in the same format. /comments/{id} returns a post and its full comment tree as Reddit's two listings, with parent_id and depth to rebuild the thread. /user/{name}/comments and the native /v1/authors/{name}/comments return one author's comments across every community, newest at the top.
For a search rather than a feed, /search?q=&type=comment runs full text over the last 30 days of comments on paid plans, with subreddit: and author: in the query. For a filtered live feed, a keyword stream matches comments against your words and delivers each match by webhook, Slack, Discord or email.
How it is metered
Every call counts one request, and every post or comment it returns counts as one result, on the sitewide feeds and everywhere else. As listed on 6 Nov 2026, Pro at $29 a month includes 1M results, Team at $99 includes 5M and Business at $299 includes 25M, with a live streaming connection on Business that pushes each comment as it arrives instead of being polled. There are no daily caps on either meter.
A collector that reads every comment on the site is a Business or Enterprise workload. A collector that reads one community's comments through /r/{sub}/comments is a request per poll and fits Pro. A tool that wants comments matching a topic should use a stream and let the matching happen before delivery.
Latency and timing
Comments typically arrive within a minute of being posted, posts within a few seconds. Scores on a comment are those observed when it entered the feed or last changed, so a comment can appear again with a new cursor when its status changes. The docs describe the feed and the comment object field by field, and the trust and safety page shows what teams build on it.