Automating Reddit saved content into my personal knowledge base
Reddit's saved page can't find anything, so I automated pulling every save into my Obsidian vault as searchable, tagged notes.
I’m a big Reddit user. I moderate subs and am active in many communities. Coming from the early days of BBS and later IRC, I love community engagement in these types of arenas. I find engaging with subject matter experts fascinating and it fuels my creative sparks. I learn so much this way.
One thing I had become frustrated with is reading a post or comment and then later seeing it deleted by a user or moderator or edited heavily.. losing the content I was looking for. I always used the save feature in Reddit as I read, as a “read it later” type of workflow. But.. ugh.. the “saved” interface on Reddit has no search, and old saves are unreachable past 1,000. I am sure many users would agree. It is nearly impossible to find older things you saved (recall, search, etc).
So in addition to saving posts, I started using Obsidian Web Clipper on some posts, as I actually already had done that for blogs and other web content to save in my vault (I’m a big Obsidian user). This worked as a snapshot, but I wondered what could I do that leveled this up a bit?
What if I could automate this? What if I could capture even deltas and changes and view them later? Search across everything. Point an LLM at it and use it as a deep knowledge base. Automate routine updates to saved posts, doing this for every post I’ve ever saved since the inception of Reddit. Analyzing how my saved posts trend, seeing my interests on a timeline, being able to have a personal AI agent see and interact with this context. This is how Reddit Stash was born.
Pulling every save out of Reddit
To get all of the posts that I have ever saved across my multiple Reddit accounts, I used Reddit’s GDPR export and some PRAW to get around the 1000 post limit that Reddit imposes on their API.
Each save is put into my vault as a markdown note with frontmatter. An LLM reads the post and writes the tags and a short summary (I have a couple free tier LLM subscriptions that let me use claude haiku for this and it’s been working great). The prompt instructs the LLM with a master tag list and keywords to choose from so that the same topics get the same tags across all notes. (example below, trimmed and with made up values)
---
sub: examplesub
title: "Which burr grinder for pour over under $200?"
type: saved_post
author: example_user
url: "https://reddit.com/r/examplesub/comments/abc123/which_burr_grinder/"
time: 2019-04-12 08:15:00
num_comments: 47
score: 112
tags:
- discussion
keywords:
- coffee
- burr-grinders
- pour-over
---I also set the timestamps of each file to the date of the Reddit post. This allows me to sort by date in Obsidian, so that the notes appear in the order that they were posted on Reddit. This is what allows for the “timeline” idea to work.
The whole thing runs in a container on my Linux server every 2 hours, so new saves show up in the vault without me needing to do anything.
My Reddit saves are like a live activity stream of my interests over time. It is one of the most helpful resources when deep in my hobbies to have this ever growing archive of knowledge to mine from, and to be able to visually see how my interests and hobbies evolve over time by analyzing the save trends.
More details are coming soon about this and tangential projects as I’m really having fun with these and see a ton of value in how I leverage these day to day.