Reddit Lab guide

Start with the sample

Press Open the sample for three saved searches around a meal logging idea with twelve weeks of generated posts. It works with no network. Remove it from the Lab when you are done.

Add a search

Add a phrase inside one subreddit, or a whole subreddit. Reddit history only searches words inside one community. If you type a bare phrase, the Lab offers a few communities to look in and adds up to 3 as separate searches. The Lab shows the number of requests and the time before it runs. Reddit history can ask for a slow-down. The Lab waits, retries, and hands failed weeks back to the queue.

The five views

• Volume: posts per week for up to 5 searches on one scale. Spike weeks (at least 2x the median and 3 posts above it) are marked on the line and listed as text. Weeks that hit the 100 post cap are flagged.
• Communities: a subreddit by week grid showing where the conversation lives and when each community lit up. Click a row to filter the threads.
• Pain themes: complaint themes such as too expensive, takes too long, missing, buggy, clunky, support and gave up, with counts, share of the sample, trend and example quotes.
• Threads: the top threads by engagement (score plus 2 per comment) with a complaint language meter.
• Changes: new posts and new complaint threads since the last check, with a per-theme ladder across checks.

How complaints are found

There is no sentiment score. A post counts as a complaint when it uses phrases from a published word list, and the phrases that matched are shown on each quote. Themes are rule-based families that the app counts itself. Your own AI agent can refine them through the Lab's tools. The Lab says which is which.

Watch, pin and ask

• Turn on the weekly re-check for a search. It runs only while Desktop is open.
• Pin a thread, or a theme with its quotes, to the evidence board.
• Ask Claude, Codex or Cursor to drive the Lab. See the Reddit Lab group in the tools reference.