Reddit Sentiment Analyzer

Track how the internet feels about anything — without the cloud

Reddit Sentiment Analyzer is a local-first tool that monitors sentiment trends across subreddits over time. Posts and comments are fetched via PRAW, scored with VADER, and served through a FastAPI backend to a React dashboard with spike detection and optional Claude escalation for ambiguous signals.

Features

• Background ingestion daemon — polls tracked subreddits every 15 minutes via APScheduler; seeds with .hot() + .top(week) on first run, then pulls .new() incrementally
• VADER scoring — compound, positive, negative, and neutral scores stored per post and comment
• 6-hour sentiment buckets — pre-aggregated time-windowed averages with spike detection at 6h, 12h, and 1d resolution
• Spike detection — flags buckets where compound score deviates beyond a configurable threshold
• React dashboard — time series chart, multi-subreddit comparison, word cloud, and spike detail panel
• Optional Claude escalation — ambiguous posts routed to Claude for deeper classification with reasoning (disabled by default)
• macOS Keychain secrets — credentials stored with keyring; no .env files with tokens on disk

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• Reddit API credentials (client ID + secret from https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps)
• uv (recommended) or pip

Installation

git clone https://github.com/saagpatel/RedditSentimentAnalyzer
cd RedditSentimentAnalyzer
uv sync

Usage

# Start the FastAPI backend
uv run uvicorn app.main:app --reload

# Start the React dashboard (separate terminal)
cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev

# Or start the ingestion daemon standalone
uv run python -m app.daemon

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Ingestion	PRAW 7.7+, APScheduler 3.10
Sentiment	vaderSentiment 3.3+
Backend	FastAPI 0.111+, Uvicorn, Pydantic v2
Database	SQLite (local, no server)
Frontend	React 19, Recharts, shadcn/ui
LLM (optional)	Anthropic Claude via anthropic SDK

Architecture

The ingestion daemon and the FastAPI server share a single SQLite database. The daemon writes to posts, comments, and sentiment_buckets tables; the API reads from them with no coupling beyond the schema. Bucket aggregation is a scheduled APScheduler job that runs SQL window functions over the raw scores — no in-memory aggregation. The React dashboard polls the REST API on a 60-second interval and renders multi-series Recharts line charts with Zustand state for filter/comparison controls.

License

MIT